Woman and homeland in Ritwik Ghataks films: Constructing post-Independence Bengali cultural identity by Erin O'Donnell The Bengali

filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak, was born in Dhaka in 1925, and lived in East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) throughout his adolescence.[1] [open notes in new window] The Bengal Famine of 1943-44, World War II and finally, the Partition of 1947 compelled Ghatak to move to Calcutta[2] where he became actively involved in the Indian Peoples Theater Association (IPTA) and the Communist Party of India (CPI). [3] Formed in 1943, IPTA was the first organized national theater movement in India that developed and performed plays addressing social injustice and British imperialism. Ghatak began working with West Bengals IPTA wing in Calcutta in 1948, writing, directing and acting in his own plays, such as Jwala (Flame, 1951) and Dalil (Document, 1952). He acted in other plays, such as revivals of Bijan Bhattacharyas Nabanna (New Harvest, 1944) and Dinabandhu Mitras Neeldarpan (Indigo Mirror, 1860), and adaptations of Gogols The Government Inspector and Gorkys The Lower Depths.[4] In 1951, Ghatak was commissioned by the Provincial Draft Preparatory Committee of IPTA to draft a document that would articulate the political and cultural ideology of IPTA in West Bengal. In his 1954 thesis On The Cultural Front, Ghatak outlined a cultural future (in ideological and organizational terms) for West Bengals IPTA in particular and the CPI in general.[5] In 1996, I edited this document. It had been stored in the Communist Party office in Calcutta until that year, when it was given to the Ritwik Memorial Trust, which has been systematically restoring Ghataks films and republishing his writings and screenplays over the last two decades. Because of many of the views Ghatak articulates in this document, and due to a smear campaign initiated against him by certain members of the CPI and documented in On The Cultural Front, he was forced to leave IPTA in 1954. He was removed from the membership rolls of the Communist Party in 1955. His dismissal letter is reprinted in On The Cultural Front. However, Ghatak has claimed that he willingly left IPTA and that he was never a CPI card-carrying member. As early as 1944 with the initial staging of Nabanna, the Bengal IPTA members disagreed about the organizations political and cultural trajectory, which echoed dissension in the CPI at large.[6] Besides working with IPTA in the 1950s, Ghatak became active in filmmaking. Beginning in 1948, Ghatak and other aspiring Bengali filmmakers, like Mrinal Sen, began to meet to discuss films and filmmaking at a teashop in Calcutta called Paradise Cafe.[7] Ghatak led members of the group to organize a trade union for the underpaid studio workers and technicians in Calcutta.[8] One of Ghataks first intensive involvements with cinema was as an actor in Nemai Ghoshs 1950 Bengali film, Chinnamul (The Uprooted). This film is pivotal in the development of Bengali cinematic realism and relates the story of a group of farmers from East Bengal who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of Partition. Supported by IPTA, Chinnamul used Calcuttas Sealdah railway station as a location and actual refugees as characters and extras. That station had political importance as a site where thousands of refugees entered the city during and after Partition. In 1952, a catalytic cinematic event for all of the emerging Bengali filmmakers, including Ghatak, Ray and Sen, occurred when the first International Film Festival was held in four Indian cities, including Calcutta. At this festival, Indian audiences first viewed Italian neo-realist films like De Sicas Bicycle Thieves and Japanese films such as Kurosawas Rashomon. Also in 1952, Ghatak produced and directed his first feature film entitled, Nagarik (The Citizen). He completed eight feature films and ten documentaries before his death in 1976. [9] In his films, Ghatak constructs detailed visual and aural commentaries of Bengal (located in northeast India) in the socially and politically tumultuous period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Twice during his lifetime Bengal was physically rent apartin 1947 by the Partition engendered by the departing British colonizers and in 1971 by the Bangladeshi War of Independence.[10] In his work, Ghatak critically

addresses and questionsfrom the personal to the national levelthe identity of post-Independence Bengal. The formation of East Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971 motivated Ghatak to seek through his films the cultural identity of Bengal in the midst of these new political divisions and physical boundaries. Ghatak was an important actor in and commentator upon Bengali culture. His films represent an influential and decidedly unique viewpoint of post-Independence Bengal. Unique, because in his films he pointedly explored the fallout of the 1947 Partition of India on Bengali society, and influential, because his films set a standard for newly-emerging alternative or parallel cinema directors in contrast to those directors who opted for the hegemonic Bollywood or Bombay style(s) of Indian cinema.[11] The majority of Ghataks films are narratives that focus on the post-Independence Bengali family and community, with a sustained critique of the emerging petite-bourgeoisie in Bengal, specifically in the urban environment of Calcutta. In this context, Ghatak utilizes a melodramatic style and mode novel to Indian cinema. His melodrama combines popular and classical idioms of performance from Bengal and India that are merged with Stanislavskian acting and Brechtian theatrical techniques. In this paper, I will examine the relations between three interconnected elements in Ghataks film narratives: women landscape (exterior and interior) sound and music. In his films, Ghatak consistently layers these three components to convey both utopian and dystopian visions of Homeland in an independent Bengal. He employs Bengali folk music and frames Bengali landscapes to inform, both aurally and visually, his representations of Bengali women as symbolic images of the joy, sorrow and nostalgia that he associates with the birth of the Indian state. I will analyze scenes from two of Ghataks films, Meghe Dhaka Tara (A Cloud-Covered Star, 1960), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962; also the name of a river in what is now Bangladesh) to illustrate this critical relationship between women, landscape, and sound and music which is fundamental to his construction of a resistant narrative of the new Indian nation.[12] First, some brief background information about the 1947 Partition of India and Ghataks melodramatic style is necessary in order to contextualize Ghataks representations of Woman and Homeland and begin to understand how these representations are linked together in his films Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha. 1947: Partition of India In August 1947, after over a year of tortuous negotiations in the midst of communal (religious) riots and killings throughout India, leaders and representatives of the departing British colonial government, the predominantly Hindu Indian Congress Party and the Muslim League decided to divide India into the Indian Union, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Furthermore, Pakistan was composed of two geographically separate (more than 1,250 miles apart) and culturally, linguistically different parts: West Pakistan (now known as simply Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now known as Bangladesh). [See map.] Consequently, Bengal was also geographically and culturally divided into two parts: East Bengal became Pakistani East Bengal or East Pakistan and West Bengal became Indian West Bengal. [See map.] An estimated ten million people, primarily Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, were forced over the next months to abandon the homes that they had lived in for generations and to migrate. Muslims fled to West and East Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India. Families were divided, friends and neighbors were left behind, and an immense mass confusion developed as to where to go and what to expect when they got there. All of these factors created tremendous tension which led to the religious hatred, riots and murders that ushered in Indias independence from Britain and the birth of Pakistan. Ghatak viewed the division of his native Bengal as mishandled and ill-conceived. Government officials, he believed, gave barely a thought to the devastating impact that such a division would (and did) have on millions of people. Ghatak spent his entire artistic life wrestling with the consequences of Partition: particularly the insecurity and anxiety engendered by the homelessness of the refugees of Bengal.[13] In his films, he tries to convey how Partition struck at the roots of Bengali culture. He seeks to express the nostalgia and yearning that many Bengalis have for their pre-Partition way of life.[14]

Ghatak was outspoken concerning Indias Independence and Partition. In response to an interviewers question regarding what personal truth had inspired his films, stories and plays, Ghatak replied: Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independencewhich is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films].[15] In another interview, Ghatak discussed the common thread of union in his films, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime, 1961; in the Indian classical musical system, an E-flat or flatted third), and Subarnarekha (1962). He stated: Against my intention the films Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha formed my trilogy. When I started Meghe Dhaka Tara, I never spoke of political unification. Even now I dont think of it because history will not alter and I wont venture to do this impossible task. The cultural segregation caused by politics and economics was a thing to which I never reconciled myself as I always thought in terms of cultural integration. This very theme of cultural integration forms the theme in all three films.[16] In his films, Ghatak often situates his preoccupation with the union of East Pakistan and West Bengal within the heart of Bengali society: the family. And through the post-Independence Bengali family, Ghatak expresses the radical transformations that occurred within Bengali culture. Ghataks families are often not the traditional extended Bengali family, but alternative, surrogate families, like the theatrical troupe in Komal Gandhar or the wandering group of misfits in Jukti Takko Ar Gappo (Arguments and a Story, 1974), who are displaced, urban, lower middle class refugees searching for a home. By utilizing a melodramatic style comprised of Bengali, Indian, European and Russian elements, Ghatak visually and aurally articulates a new Bengali homeland. Indian melodrama: Ghataks melodramatic style Tracing the development of melodrama as a mode, genre and/or style in Indian, specifically Bengali, literature, theater and cinema is obviously beyond the scope of this paper.[17] Ghatak utilizes melodrama primarily as a style or mode rather than a coherently developed genre. He constructs his melodramatic style within the general Indian popular cinematic context of the 1940s and 1950s Hindi social films of directors like Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor and the specific, regional context of 1950s and 1960s Bengali neo-realist art films of directors like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.[18] In an attempt to refine the definition of melodrama in relation to realism in the context of Indian cinema, the Indian film scholar Ravi Vasudevan explains: The conceptual separation of melodrama from realism which occurred through the formation of bourgeois canons of high art in late nineteenth century Europe and America was echoed in the discourses on popular commercial cinema of late 1940s and 1950s India. This strand of criticism, associated with the formation of the art cinema in Bengal, could not comprehend the peculiarities of a form (i.e., melodrama) which had its own complex mechanisms of articulation. In the process, the critics contributed to an obfuscating hierarchization of culture with which we are still contending.[19] Vausdevans observation is significant for Ghataks work because as a filmmaker who unabashedly employs a melodrama modality that combined maudlin and Marxist elements, Ghatak often stands in a cinematic space in between the popular cinema of Bombay and the art cinema of Bengal. The Indian cinema scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha helps to further situate Ghataks films within melodrama in the Bengali cinematic context: In Bengal, where a cinema had developed which was economically strong but culturally subservient to the novel, melodrama acquired an oppositional force, e.g. in Baruas work which subverted the literary, and in the Kallol filmmakers where it later found new alignments with the IPTAs formal emphasis on the folk

theatre.[20] For Rajadhyaksha, after the nihilistic love stories of Bengali-Hindi director and actor P.C. Barua in the 1930s-40s, and the socially conscious, folk-infused plots of the Kallol and IPTA filmmakers in the 1930s50s, Ghataks narratives are a next step in the evolution of melodrama in Bengali cinema.[21] As we will see later, scholars who have written on Ghatak, like Geeta Kapur, the Indian cultural critic, and Kumar Shahani, an Indian filmmaker and former Ghatak student, perceive Ghataks films as daring to push the boundaries of melodramatic modality.[22] Throughout his essays and interviews, Ghatak discusses how he interweaves material from Indian mythology and Upanishadic, Marxist and Jungian philosophy into a melodramatic narrative form.[23] He deliberately uses coincidence and repetition to educate an audience and to express ideas. In Ghataks 1963 article, Film and I, he writes that melodrama is a much abused genre, from which a truly national cinema will emerge when truly serious and considerate artists bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it.[24] In a 1974 interview, he states: I am not afraid of melodrama. To use melodrama is ones birthright, it is a form.[25] Ghatak largely developed his melodramatic style of cinema when he was a playwright, actor and director during the 1940s and 1950s in IPTA. The variety of both indigenous and foreign theatrical styles that IPTA incorporated such as the Bengali folk form, jatra, and Brechts epic form greatly contributed to the theatrical shape of Ghataks melodramatic style.[26] Ghataks films are frequently characterized as epic; he often inverts and recontextualizes Indian traditions and myths.[27] He described Indians as an epicminded people who liked to be told the same myths and legends again and again, and he viewed this epic attitude as a living tradition.[28] In the following sections on Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, I will give examples of Ghataks deconstruction of traditional mythologies surrounding the Bengali woman, and his insertion of reconstructed representations into a modern context to critique his present historical moment.[29] In the 1960s, Ghatak translated Brechts The Life of Galileo and Caucasian Chalk Circle from English to Bengali. In numerous essays and interviews, he discusses the impact on his work of Brechts epic approach, alienation effect and use of coincidence.[30] Ghatak draws upon the diverse theatrical traditions of IPTA, Brecht and Stanislavski, and the various cinematic visions of Eisenstein, Godard and Bunuel to come up with use own melodramatic vision.[31] The technical details of Ghataks melodramatic style include the following stylistic traits: frequent use of a wide angle lens, placement of the camera at very high, low and irregular angles, dramatic lighting composition, expressionistic acting style and experimentation with songs and sound effects. With this combination of cinematic devices, Ghatak creates a melodramatic post-Partition world in which he constructs his vision of Woman and Homeland in post-Independence Bengal. In cinema, the family, the home, with women mothers, wives, daughters and sisters as the key players is the primary site of domestic melodrama.[32] In Bengali culture, the home houses the heart of Bengali society: the family. And at the core of the Bengali family is ma, the mother.[33] Within the homes of Ghataks post-Independence Bengal lies the site of both ananda (joy) and dukkho (sorrow), emotions intensely expressed by his female characters, frequently through song. These songs and music distill the essence or rasa of the joy and sorrow that Ghataks characters experience, and the music track enables these emotions full force and weight to be communicated to the audience.[34] The ability of music and song to express powerful emotions beyond the visual dimension of a film, even beyond the film text itself, is particularly evident in Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, and Subarnarekha.The film sound scholar Caryl Flinn relates in her book Strains of Utopia: Melodrama critics assert that the non-representational register (i.e., music) reveals elements which cannot be conveyed through representational means alone, a fundamental split that seems to guarantee the genres potentially subversive effects.[35] In these two films, Ghatak uses songs and music, from Bengali folksongs to a Nino Rota film score, and

sound effects, such as Nitas sonically matched whiplash and Sitas amplified breathing, as a counterpoint to and comment on the narrative action. Ghatak is one of the first Indian filmmakers to explore the power and diversity of a films non-representational register. In these two films, Ghatak specifically focuses on the interrelations betweeen his female characters, the Bengali landscape and Bengali music to visualize a new, often utopic and dystopic, Bengali homeland. In the remainder of this paper, employing theoretical concepts from Geeta Kapur, Kumar Shahani and Hamid Naficy, I will detail scenes from Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha in order to illustrate this point. After providing a brief synopsis of Meghe Dhaka Tara, I will provide an analysis of the films primary female character, Nita, in the context of soundscape and landscape. Brief synopsis of Meghe Dhaka Tara Meghe Dhaka Tara is set in the late 1950s in Calcutta. The story revolves around a Bengali lower-middle class, refugee family who were victims of Partition and who are now struggling for survival in a bustee (slum) on the outskirts of the city. The eldest daughter, Nita ("Knowledge"), has given up her college studies in order to work. She is the breadwinner of the family. Her elder brother Shankar, who would normally be the head of the household, is eccentric and irresponsible. He spends his days singing, practicing scales and classical Indian khayals,[36] and dreaming of becoming a great singer. Nitas old father teaches in a small school nearby and her mother maintains the house. Nitas selfish younger siblings, Gita and Montu, are still in school. In her bleak life, Nita has only one thing to look forward to: the return of Sanat, a young scientist she hopes one day to marry. Through many twists and turns of the plot, Nitas family becomes increasingly dependent on her earnings. Nitas father and Montu both have debilitating accidents and Shankar leaves home for Bombay to become a singing star. Sanat does return, but falls in love with and marries Nitas sister, Gita. The stresses and strains of Nitas life take their toll. She develops tuberculosis and, although she is desperately ill, continues to work to support her family. Shankar returns from Bombay, now an accomplished classical singer, to find Nita wasting away with a terminal illness. Shankar takes her to a sanatorium in the hills where she remains, uncertain whether she will live or die, and forgotten by her family. Nita as goddess: Durga/Uma/Gauri The two main female characters of Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha Nita and Sita are not only emotionally and physically sacrificed by their families but are also symbolically sacrificed as goddesses. As symbolic goddesses, Nita and Sita represent the Motherland of Bengal and it is Bengali society who sacrifices Her with division and greed.[37] First, I will examine Ghataks portrayal of Nita, then his construction of Sita, as Woman, Goddess, and Bengal, the Motherland through the use of various songs and sound effects in the context of the Bengali landscape. The theoretical work of the Iranian and exilic film scholar Hamid Naficy elucidates what is at stake for Ghatak in these two films and as a filmmaker, particularly as an accented or exilic filmmaker.[38] Naficy defines accented filmmakers as situated but universal figures who work in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices.[39] Characterizing Ghatak as an accented or exilic filmmaker is appropriate not only because he endured the trauma of the partition of his beloved Bengal, but also because the director cinematically commented on subsequent political and cultural fallout from that tragic separation throughout his career. Ghatak is interstitial because he had to struggle constantly to obtain funding and equipment to create the kind of films he wanted, largely outside of the Calcutta and Bombay film studio systems. And he is also interstitial because his films subject matter and style were often astride that of Indian popular cinema and Bengali art cinema.

The stylistic components of accented cinema that I will focus on when detailing scenes with Nita and Sita from Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha are the open-form, natural exteriors and closed-form, claustrophobic interiors used in the mise-en-scene and setting, and the films way of eliciting dysphoric, euphoric, or nostalgic structures of feeling, specifically through song, music, and sound effects. These stylistic components shape Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, and resonate with the technical characteristics of Ghataks melodramatic style detailed above. In these two films, Ghatak emphasizes themes of home, homeland, displacement, rupture, utopia, dystopia, urban vs. rural, city vs. village, etc. In his work, Ghatak agonized over the fact that he and multitudes like him were compulsory exiles, refugees in their own homeland, due to the artificial, arbitrary division of Bengal into West Bengal and East Pakistan. Ghatak attempts to illustrate the end result of Partitions forced migration of millions as political, cultural, and geographical deterritorialization and stasis through depicting the entrapment of the female characters of Nita and Sita in their houses and in their fragmented homeland. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the character Nita is actually the manifestation of multiple goddesses: Durga as Jagadhatri, the benevolent image of the eternal giver and universal sustainer, and Uma/Gauri, the Mother Goddess.[40] In her essay Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ira Bhaskar points out how Nita represents the benign manifestation of Durga: A prevalent story about the genesis of Durga is the concept of Havyagni (oblation to the sacrificial fire). In the ritual of the Havan (the act of consigning the mortal offering to the sacrificial flames) is symbolized the surrender of human desires and aspirations which are carried to the heavens with the smoke. It is believed that Durga was born out of this smoke as a transmutation of human desires, taking the form of Jagadhatari, the universal sustainer. One of the central images associated with Nita is the courtyard wherein are centered the ambitions of the rest of the family... These selfish ambitions pour into the courtyard, the symbolic yagna mandapa, from which manifests Nita in the role of the Provider and Creator.[41] The sight and sound of the fire that Nitas mother uses symbolically to sacrifice her daughter adds to the construction of the Jagadhatari image in the family courtyard. Traditionally, the courtyard of a Bengali or Indian home is the heart of the household. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the courtyard is an oppressive, suffocating space, particularly for Nita. Significant here is Naficys articulation of the outside, external and domestic, internal spaces of accented cinema as feminized and his perception of all accented films as feminine texts. He explains: For the exiles, the house is a site of both deep harmony and hatred... Significantly, the discourse of memory feminized the house as an enclosure of femininity and domesticity, associated with motherhood and reproduction. This is how many exiles feminize the homeland... In the accented cinema, the house is an intensely charged place and a signifying trope.[42] Throughout Meghe Dhaka Tara, the courtyard is an intensely charged place that does not signify Nitas potential motherhood. Rather it serves as the site of her tragic deterioration at the hands of her overly dependent family members. Ghatak often cuts or pans from the mother (as the destructive Kali and parasitic Chandi, both malevolent manifestations of Durga), surrounded by the smoke of the hearth, to Nita. With the exaggerated sound of boiling rice serving as the transition, the camera moves from the mother to medium close-ups of Nita as Jagadhatri, the nourishing force who has to be immolated. The pronounced sound of the boiling rice kettle that Nitas mother is always watching over accentuates her insatiable greed. Whenever the conversation in the courtyard turns to the possibility of Nita, the sole breadwinner of the family, getting married, the sound of the boiling kettle is amplified on the soundtrack, usually in conjunction with a close-up of Nitas mothers panic-stricken face. In his 1976 article, Nature, in the End, is Grandly Indifferent, Ghataks former student Kumar Shahani addresses the manifestation of what he calls the femininity principle in the Indian tradition in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Shahani believes that one of Ghataks greatest contributions to Indian films was reinvigorating and restoring this femininity principle to its pre-Brahmanical, agrarian roots. Shahani writes: The triangular division taken from Tantric abstraction is the key to the understanding of this complex film. The inverted triangle represents, in the Indian tradition, fertility and the femininity principle. The breaking up

of society is visualized as a three-way division of womanhood. The three principle woman characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine, Nita, has the preserving and nurturing quality; her sister, Gita, is the sensual woman; their mother represents the cruel aspect. The incapacity for Nita to combine and contain all these qualities, to retain only the nurturing quality to the exclusion of others, is the source of her tragedy.[43] Nitas blind sustaining of her family at the cost of her health and life is also reflected in her representation as Uma. Ghatak states, Uma has been the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengali households for centuries.[44] Ghataks identification of Nita with Uma is ironic because her family sacrifices her wifehood and motherhood. Throughout Meghe Dhaka Taras soundtrack, Ghatak uses refrains from Bengali folk songs that lament Umas departure from her familial home to go to her husbands home.[45] One song, mourning Umas leaving, Ghatak uses extra-diegetically several times in Meghe Dhaka Tara, specifically when Nitas senile father casts her out of the family house when she is dying from tuberculosis. The lyrics go as follows: Come, my daughter Uma, to me. Let me garland you with flowers. You are the soul of my sad self, Mother, the deliverer. Let me bid you farewell now, my daughter! You are leaving my home desolate, for your husbands place. How do I endure your leaving, my daughter? Ghatak utilizes this traditional Bengali folk song to counterpoint Nitas reality; Nita is not the new bride heading for her husbands home: she is the sickly, unwed daughter who is being banished from her home because she has become a liability rather than an asset. She has been forced into exile. Mirroring her deteriorating condition, Nitas home has become claustrophobic and ill strangled by the fears and anxieties of her family. This song ironically comments on Nitas fate after she has been cast out of her familys house. For in her role as Uma and the consort of Shiva Lord of Destruction and Eternal Time who resides in the Himalayan mountains, Nita goes to a sanatorium in the Shillong hills of Bengal to die, as if in Shivas lap. In traditional Hindu mythology, the Himalayan mountains are the site of the happy reunion of Uma and her husband, Shiva[46]; but in Meghe Dhaka Tara, poignantly, a hill station in the mountains is where Nita is cast out to die alone. Thus, Ghatak inverts the traditional Hindu myth where Shiva and Uma share a joyous reunion in the Himalayas to emphasize the tragedy of Nitas impending death. While discussing the multi-faceted Bengali artist Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian cultural historian Geeta Kapur elaborates upon Ghataks reconstruction of Indian myths: But even fewer artists can achieve, simultaneously, the reconstruction of an archetype that turns into a device to speak about the type within a class; to present the problem of a class-constructed psyche which so quickly appropriates mythic elements to serve vested interests. I am thinking of Ritwik Ghatak, for whom too [along with Ray] Tagore is a mentor. Certainly in the cinema only this one man, Ghatak, dares to put his stakes so high, and expectedly the cinematic means he uses are bold and hybrid: he does not subscribe to the sacred as such, nor to the revelatory. But nor does he rest content with doubt that declares itself proof of the rational, and an automatic representation, therefore, of the secular. He places rationality within a melodramatic genre and examines the status of doubt there, in that fraught schema, where tragedy is made to give itself over in favour of praxis. (My italics.)[47] Thus, Ghatak is making use of Indian myths and archetypes within a melodramatic context as an exercise in exploring the degradation of post-Independence Bengali society. Nita, Sita and Rabindra Sangeet In Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, Ghatak uses songs by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengals creative genius, who was a poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, song

composer (0f both lyrics and music), philosopher, teacher, and Nobel Prize winner. Tagore wrote over 2,000 songs, known as Rabindra sangeet or Rabindra song, compositions that incorporated elements of Indian classical music and Bengali folk songs.[48] In his biography of Tagore, Krishna Kripalani describes the impact of Tagores songs in Bengali culture: For each change of the season, each aspect of his countrys rich landscape, every undulation of the human heart, in sorrow or joy, has found its voice in some song of his.[49] His songs often celebrate Nature and the Divine, specifically in the physical and spiritual context of Bengal. [50] As previously mentioned, in his films Ghatak utilizes a variety of musical forms, both Indian and non-Indian, and commonly uses Tagores music. As Ghatak stated in an interview just before his death: I cannot speak without Tagore. That man has culled all of my feelings from long before my birth. He has understood what I am and he has put in all the words. I read him and I find that all has been said and I have nothing new to say.[51] Ghatak, like most Bengalis, considers Tagore as the embodiment of all that is great in Bengali culture, as the pinnacle of artistic expression in Bengal. When Ghatak uses a Tagore song in a film, it often evokes among Bengalis nostalgia and longing for an undivided, pre-Partition Bengal. Ghatak situates Tagore songs within the painful context of the struggle for survival of post-Independence Bengali families, and the songs serve to shape and give dimension to the characters of Nita and Sita. In both Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, Ghatak uses Tagore songs at climatic moments to express the joy and sorrow of the postIndependence Bengali woman, who must bear the burden of rebuilding the family in the aftermath of Partition. Nitas Rabindra Sangeet The only time that Nita sings in the film is just before her sister Gitas wedding to her [Nitas] former suitor, Sanat, and before her brother Shankars departure to Bombay to launch his singing career. Traditionally, Shankar as the eldest son should have assumed responsibility for the household when his father became incapacitated, but that burden fell to Nita. In the dark and flimsy thatched hut, Nita and Shankar sit feeling melancholy as they look at a photograph of themselves as children in the hills. The sounds of muted raindrops and frogs croaking drift in from the outside. The claustrophobic interior reflects the suffocation of Nita as her tuberculosis advances. Her home crumbles around her as she herself withers away. Throughout the scene, the heads and profiles of Nita and Shankar are strongly lit from the front and back, often against almost total blackness, giving the composition a disembodied feel. Shankar declares that he is leaving their home in protest against her suffering and smothering at the hands of the family. She asks him to teach her a Tagore song, as she will be expected to sing at Gitas wedding. As Shankar starts the song and Nita joins in, the camera slowly dollies at a low angle away from them, to a long shot of the pair from across the stifling, dim room. The chasm widens between brother and sister as they sing. The song is about a visitation by God: I didnt realize that You had come to my room, the night when my doors broke down in the raging storm. Darkness had encompassed everything, my oil lamp blew out. I stretched out my hand to the sky, though I knew not towards whom. I lay forlorn in the darkness thinking the storm a dream, ignorant that the storm was actually a symbol of Your victory flag. Opening my eyes in the morning I am amazed to behold You, standing [there], filling the room, [filling] my hearts void.

Because Nita sings this song at a critical moment in the narrative, when her family is abandoning her and she is becoming increasingly sick, the song appears to be a metaphor for her coming death. This Tagore piece also portends of the sequence to come where Nitas ailing father orders her to leave the house in the middle of the night when a storm is raging outside. By the end of the song, the camera has dollied back to the pair; in the remaining shots they are now separately framed. The singular composition of the last few shots of the scene signal Nitas isolation and estrangement from even Shankar. The climatic shot is a low angle, medium close-up of Nitas frightened face. Her eyes widen as she clutches her neck with her hands and silently gasps for air, while the faint sound of a whiplash comes up on the soundtrack. A cut follows to Nita alone in the blackness, collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her sobs meld into a solitary sarod strain on the soundtrack. Thus, the sound of the whiplash undercuts the deliverance that the Tagore song promises. Salvation and redemption are not in Nitas future not even as a symbolic goddess. Ghatak utilizes the extra-diegetic sound of the whip to represent the weight of social and historical forces bearing down upon Nita, as an individual and as symbolic Motherland, and, by extension, to convey an awareness of these forces to his audience. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has remarked when analyzing Meghe Dhaka Tara, In the film, there is a constant attempt to bring out the romantic through various conventions and violently negate them, reverse them into an indictment of the romantic sensibility.[52] The specific romantic sensibility that Ghatak is critiquing here has its modern origins in the so-called Bengali renaissance of the 19th century, the cultural era from which Tagore emerged.[53]In this scene, Ghatak politically activates Rabindra sangeet, pushing it beyond its romantic borders to shed light on the social realities of the present. The sacrifice of Nita The penultimate scene of Meghe Dhaka Tara focuses on Nita and takes place in a sanatorium among the Shillong hills of Bengal. In the previous scene, Nita was trapped in a decrepit hut; now she resides in a hospital for the sick and dying in the middle of ostensibly boundless nature. However, the spatial significance of the Shillong hills as the site of Nitas demise is that here nature is not represented as idyllic and timeless, but is suffocating, indifferent and indicative of Nitas mortality. Shankar (Nitas brother who has become a well-known classical Indian singer) is visiting her and they are sitting outside on a vast lawn surrounded by the hills. Nita is framed against the encircling landscape, which reinforces the feminization of the space. However, Nita is not immortalized as a goddess in this space, but is pictured as small, insignificant as a human who will suffer an agonizing death. Ghatak undermines any, in Naficys words, nostalgic longing to the homelands natural landscape, for Nita is now hostage to this land, held in permanent exile.[54] Shankar relates news of the antics of Gitas (Nitas younger sisters) new son (a motherhood Nita will never experience), when suddenly she gets up, grabs his shirt and frantically cries, Brother, you know I really want to live. I love so much to be alive. Brother, tell me once that I will live. Brother, I want to go home. I want to live! These last three words are amplified and reverberated on the soundtrack and joined with a droning sound and a whip cracking (two reoccurring sound effects that are always matched with Nita) as the camera pans in dizzying 180 degree panoramic shots of the surrounding hills of Bengal. Nitas violent cry, her unrelenting affirmation of life, counterpoints the claustrophobic confinement in which she will spend her final days. In juxtaposition to Ghataks expansive and fluid camerawork, Nitas entrapment in this natural space conveys stasis and rigidity. The immense landscape appears to collapse around her as she gasps and struggles to find her voice on the soundtrack for her visual image is now absent and we are left with the sound of her disembodied utterances. Yet Nita, as diseased Woman, fallen Goddess and dystopian Bengal (i.e., Motherland), is determined to live on even as she is dying. Ultimately, however, Meghe Dhaka Tara illustrates Ghataks skepticism about the future of the Bengali family and the Bengali homeland. After the following description of Subarnarekhas narrative, I will examine the character Sita, as woman and as

mythological goddess, shaped by music and landscape. A brief synopsis of Subarnarekha Subarnarekha begins in a setting similar to that of Meghe Dhaka Tara: a lower middle-class family living in a bustee on the outskirts of Calcutta immediately following Partition. This bustee is a camp, called New Life Colony, for refugees from East Bengal. The narrative of Subarnarekha focuses on Sita, whose mother and father were killed during Partition, and who is being raised by her elder brother, Ishwar. Ishwar has also taken in a poor, low-caste boy named Abhiram. They move to the Bengali countryside for a fresh start when Ishwar gets a job as an assistant manager in an iron foundry. Sita spends her life caring for her unmarried brother, until she grows into a young woman and falls in love with Abhiram. Ishwar is determined to find a proper high-caste Hindu husband for Sita and demands that she never see Abhiram again. Ishwar proceeds to arrange Sitas marriage, yet Sita, resolved to marry Abhiram, escapes with him to Calcutta on her wedding night. Once again living in a bustee, the newly married couple has a child, Binu, and Abhiram finds work as a bus driver. One day, he accidentally runs over a child and an angry mob kills him. Sita is forced to earn money for her and Binu. She begins to sing for paying customers, and thus unwittingly becomes a prostitute. One night, Ishwar, on a business trip to Calcutta, visits Sita in a drunken stupor to avail himself of her services, not realizing that this prostitute is his sister. In shock at seeing her brother in these circumstances, Sita kills herself. At the conclusion of the film, Binu is placed in the care of Ishwar, who although devastated, attempts to move on for the sake of his nephew. Sita as goddess: Sita/Sati/Radha Through song, Ghatak portrays Sita as both mother and loveras the goddess Sita and the mythical lover of Krishna, Radha.[55] One day, in Chhatimpur in the Bengali countryside, Sita, as a young girl, is idly walking along an abandoned airstrip singing a Bengali folk song when she encounters Ishwars senile old boss. He asks Sita her name and then proceeds to tell her the story of her birth and death. The old man tells Sita how her mythical namesake was found as a baby in the furrow of a field by King Janak and how she returned to her mother, Earth, when scorned by her husband, Rama, who believed that she had cheated on him with the evil demon, Ravana. Ghatak reworks this mythological tale in Subarnarekha to climax with the female character Sitas committing suicide with a kitchen knife in response to the horror of seeing her brother, Ishwar (God in Hindi), at her doorstep to solicit her services as a prostitute. In this film, yet another layer to the reconstruction of the goddess archetype in the character of Sita can be found in the Puranic tale of Sati, another manifestation of the goddess Durga, who burns herself through the fire of her concentration (yogagni) in order to satisfy the ethics of good womanhood (satidharma) because her father, Daksha, while under the influence of a magic garland had engaged in unseemly sexual behavior towards her.[56] Daksha is greatly opposed to Satis marriage to the god, Shiva. In Subarnarekha, Ishwar represents Daksha, for he is a surrogate father to Sita. As a symbolic father, Ishwar, like Daksha has an incestuous attachment to Sita (Sati) and an intense dislike for her husband Abhiram (Shiva). As Sati immolates herself, similarly Sita sacrifices herself when confronted with the shame of the sexual advances of her drunken brother Ishwar. Sita as a young woman continually sings melancholy Krishna kirtan (songs in praise of Lord Krishna) while sitting among the hills and by the river, Subarnarekha. The spaciousness of Sitas homescape as an adolescent contrasts with her claustrophobic confines in Calcutta as a young adult. Sitas rootedness to the surrounding geography of her youth is illustrated in her song and in Ghataks framing of her in the rocky, riverine landscape. In one scene Sita is sitting on a sandbank and there is a close-up of sand sifting through her hands. The sifting sand symbolizes the time passed since Sita has last seen Abhiram, and evokes the image of Sita as one with the earth, her symbolic mother. Ghatak then pulls back to a medium close-up and then a long shot of Sita so that we see her on the sandbank by the river with the hills in the background. She begins to sing the following Krishnakirtan : See the dawn is coming.

The people wake up. The breeze wakes up. The birds wake up. The sky appears. Oh Shyam [Krishna, the Dark One], why do you still lie asleep? Where were you, awake all night? See the dawn is breaking. Ghatak frames Sita as part of the surrounding expanse of landscape and nature while she sings this song of longing so as to identify Sita, as Sita her namesake, with her mother, Earth, and to depict Sita, as Radha, singing her song of love in separation to Abhiram, as Krishna. Ghataks use of a wide angle lens serves to fuse together the vast, open vista and the image of Sita as iconic motherland. The use of a Krishna kirtan, which portrays the Krishna/Radha dilemma of love in separation, is also a metaphor for the division of Bengal and the nostalgia and longing that geographical separation has engendered. Ghataks constant use of Krishna kirtan throughout Subarnarekha serves to permeate the film with a feel of yearning for a united Bengal. Sitas Rabindra Sangeet Sitas growth as a woman is told through song, particularly a song by Tagore. The song personifies Sita and follows her lifes trajectory. As a small girl, Sita sings the song, which describes and revels in the surrounding nature of the rural Bengal landscape. After she runs away to marry Abhiram against Ishwars wishes, her brother is so haunted by the song that he attempts to hang himself. As a wife and mother, Sita sings this same song from her childhood to her son, Binu. And after her death, Binu suddenly breaks into the song, offering a glimmer of hope at the conclusion of the film. Ghatak uses the song to illustrate the innocence and openness of the world of Sita and Binu as children and to serve as a counterpoint to the degradation and boundedness of the environment of Sita and Ishwar as adults. The song goes: The sun and shade play hide and seek over the paddy field today; someone has floated rafts of white clouds on the blue sky. Today the bumblebees forgot to draw nectar from the flowers; instead they gleefully flit around in the [morning] light. Today the birds swarm the riverbed, no one knows why. We will not go home today, we will stay out and absorb nature as much as we can.... The day will be spent (idly), only by playing the flute. In the final shot sequence of Subarnarekha, Sitas son, Binu, is sitting at a train station with Sitas brother, Ishwar. Binu is starring blankly into space while remembering how Sita, now dead, used to sing this Tagore song from her childhood to him, as the song slowly comes up on the soundtrack. In close-up, Binu begins singing the song, which greatly surprises and saddens Ishwar. Here, Ghatak interweaves history, memory and nature. This Rabindra sangeet represents Sitas voice as it echoes across the riverine countryside, like Nitas voice resonates against the Shillong hills at the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara. The feminized homeland remains, but the women endure only as fractured, disembodied memories. In the next and final scene, Binu and Ishwar are seen in a wide angle, long shot, trudging along the banks of the Subarnarekha river in West Bengal, surrounded by hills and trees. Binu leads the dazed, plodding Ishwar by the hand and incites him to move along into the seemingly endless, daunting landscape. The pair is attempting to go home. It is a home they will now have to recreate after Sitas suicide. The films opening classical Indian raga and womens chorus rise up on the soundtrack to join with the sound of rushing water and Binus childish voice. The womens chorus fades to a single, female voice as the final shot reveals the Bengali inscription, Victory to man, to this new born child, ever-living. Thus, Ghatak leaves us with the sound and image of children as the only hope for the survival of post-Independence Bengal. The sacrifice of Sita

At the end of Subarnarekha, Sita is truly in exile. She now resides alone in a rented room with her son because she has had to flee her home in the countryside due to her brothers irrational jealousy towards her husband, Abhiram, and now the husband is dead. While Sitas youth was spent in the idyllic open structures of home (that) emphasize continuity, her adulthood devolves in the urban slums of Calcutta those paranoid structures of exile (that) underscore rupture.[57] In the sequence where Sita commits suicide, Ghataks ingenious employment of sound is fully realized. Sitas sacrificial final scene is related entirely through song, sound effects and silence. It has no dialogue. When the completely inebriated Ishwar arrives at Sitas house, he has no idea that Sita is the prostitute whom he is visiting. Ishwar is not only drunk but also almost blind because earlier in a bar he dropped his glasses and stepped on them. He is literally and symbolically visionless. His inability to see beyond Abhirams lower caste status has propelled Sita into these dire circumstances. In order to maintain his position in his job and society, Ishwar has renounced Sita, his only family member. Exiting a taxi, Ishwar stumbles towards Sitas house; a point of view shot illustrates his blurry and distorted vision. As Ishwar stands weaving back and forth on the threshold of the door to Sitas suffocatingly small, dark room, the faint strains of Nino Rotas La Dolce Vita[58] theme are heard as we see an out-of-focus long shot of Sita. In his article, Sound in Cinema, Ghatak states: There are times when a tune used in a film by someone else is used to make an observation, the way I myself have done. The music that accompanies the scene of orgy at the end of La Dolce Vita, where Fellini lashes out at the whole of Western civilization, is known as Patricia. I sought to make a similar statement in my Subarnarekha about my own land, this Bengal, so sparkling with intellect. So I have used the same music in the bar scene [and in Sitas suicide scene], to make a suggestion. Was I influenced? Not at all. The music merely helped me say a lot of things.[59] Helped me say a lot of things for Ghatak refers to his commentary on the senselessness of the dissolution of post-Independence Bengali culture and society. As Kumar Shahani has explained while discussing Ghataks evolution of an epic cinematic form: In Subarnarekha, the dramatic element disintegrates, its cliches are turned against itself; the traumatic prostitution of our culture is exemplified as Sanskrit becomes part of La Dolce Vita in one of the worlds poorest cities. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers.[60] The Rota theme becomes a loud drone as Ghatak cuts to a medium close-up of Ishwar drenched in sweat. The drone fades into the sound of Sitas rapid, terrified breathing. There is a cut to a blurred close-up of Sitas petrified face and frozen doe-like eyes. Visually and aurally the feeling of Sitas claustrophobia and confinement is accelerated. In the final seconds of the scene, Ghatak constructs a powerful montage of sound and visuals. With Sitas exaggerated breathing serving as an audio transition, Ghatak cuts to a large kitchen knife, then to an extreme close-up of Sitas unblinking eye filling the frame. Her body is now completely fragmented; her identity reduced to an omniscient eye, in contrast to Ishwars physical and metaphorical blindness. Sita is trapped, inert with fear; her goddess stature diminished to a distorted and disembodied representation. Then there is a very quick cut to Sitas picking up the knife accompanied by the fleeting sound of a knife being sharpened. We hear a crash of cymbals and a dull thud as a cut to a confused, reeling Ishwar reveals a few bloodstains on his white kurta. With the drone of strings, more blood spurts on to Ishwars clothes. We see the table with Sitas tambora (a traditional Indian string instrument) on it shaking, joined by the sound of Sitas bangles and body in her death throes. The camera swiftly pans around the room and lands upon a shot of Ishwars face reflected in a small mirror on a bed also on the bed are a comb, some hair clips, and Sitas arm and hand, her fingers clutching, desperately clawing, the white sheet as she dies. Then there is a cut to a close-up of Ishwars blood-spattered face followed by the first in-focus shot of Sitas face as a death masque and absolute silence. The sonic and visual impact of Sitas self-sacrifice is shocking. The dramatic construction of the scene underscores the epic tragedy of Sitas death the sacrifice of Bengal caused by the decadence of Ishwar, the excesses of Bengali society.

Conclusion In Ritwik Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, representations of Woman and Homeland are inextricably intertwined in setting, sound, and song. Mixing and layering traditions with innovations infused with socio-historical observations and critiques, Ghatak creates a cinema that offers a complex vision of post-Independence Bengal, where both dystopian and utopian futures are envisioned for his Bengali homeland. Hamid Naficy has observed: But exile must not be thought of as a generalized condition of alienation and difference, or as one of the items on the diversity-chic menu. All displaced people do not experience exile equally or uniformly. Exile discourse thrives on detail, specificity and locality. There is a there there in exile.[61] As an exilic filmmaker, Ghatak attempts to portray the ambivalence and contradictions of Bengali society in post-Partition Bengal. And as a refugee, Ghatak is compelled in his work to interrogate and continually reassess Bengals cultural memory, identity, and history. In his 1970s essay, Society, Our Traditions, Filmmaking and My Effort, Ghatak states: Childs play with film is no longer fitting. The huge formative nation-building role of films in this country will be here soon.[62] In his films, Ghatak not only constructs varying visions of his Bengali homeland, but also consciously attempts to activate films political and cultural role in newly independent India. Endnotes 1. This article is part of a chapter in my forthcoming dissertation on the films of Ritwik Ghatak for the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the editors at Jump Cut for their invaluable comments that have enhanced this article and my work in general. I would like to particularly thank Jyotiki Virdi for her assistance and persistence. [return to text in new window] 2. To avoid reader confusion, I must note here the West Bengal Governments passage of a constitutional amendment declaring from January 1, 2001, the beginning of the new millennium, that Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata. A variety of reasons for the name change were given, ranging from the argument that the new name would reflect the pronunciation of the citys name in Bengali and would protect the states linguistic identity, to the contention that the new name suggests a compromise between acknowledging the citys colonial past and the need to restore its threatened identity as a Bengali city. For more on the history of the citys name, see Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2003), pp. 1-4. Given the historical context I am discussing, I will use Calcutta throughout this paper. 3. For more on IPTA, see Rustom Bharucha, Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1983); Eugene Van Erven, The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and particularly, Sudhi Pradhan, Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, Vols. I-III (Calcutta: Santi Pradhan, 1979-1985), and IPTA, 50th Anniversary Volume of IPTA (Calcutta: 1993). For more on this period of Ghataks artistic life see: Atnu Pal, ed. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust 1988), specifically Ghataks lengthy interview in Bengali with Probir Sen, 14-48. This interview has been recently translated into English in Sandipan Bhattacharya and Sibaditya Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face (Calcutta: Cinecentral, 2003). In addition to his engagement with theater in the late 1940s, Ghatak began writing short stories, which are collected inBengali in Ritwik Ghataker Golpo (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 1987), and translated into English by Rani Ray in a collection entitled Ritwik Ghatak: Stories (New Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 2001).

4. Bijan Bhattacharyas Nabanna is about the millions of peasants who died during the Bengal famine of 1943-1944. The inflationary market for rice, heavily demanded by Indias army during World War II, led grain merchants and moneylenders in Calcutta to buy up peasant stocks that should have been kept in villages for food and seed. Bijan Bhattacharya was an actor, writer and founding member of IPTA, who starred in many of Ghataks films and was a lifelong friend. Dinabandhu Mitras Neeldarpan is about the plight of a Bengali landlords family and its tenants at the hands of the British indigo planters in the late 19th century. Both plays were social-political landmarks in both Bengali and Indian theater. 5. On The Cultural Front: A Thesis Submitted by Ritwik Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954 (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 2000. 6. See Crisis in Bengal IPTA, in Sudhi Pradhan, ed., Marxist Cultural Movement in India, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Santi Pradhan, 1979), pp. 324-332. The history of the CPI is also fractious, with a split of the party in 1964 into the CPI and the CPI (Marxist), and the splintering in 1969 of the CPI(M) into the CPI(M) and CPI(Marxist-Leninist). See The Communist Party, in Sumanta Banerjee, Indias Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising (London: Zed Books, 1984), pp. 58-81. 7. See Paradise Caf in Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life. Politics. Cinema. (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002), pp. 105-109. In 1947, Chidananda Das Gupta (the noted Indian film critic) and Satyajit Ray (Indias first internationally recognized filmmaker) formed the Calcutta Film Society, which for the first time introduced many novice Bengali filmmakers, such as Ghatak and Sen, to European and Soviet films. 8. See Sen, Montage, pp. 106-108 and Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema and I (Calcutta; Ritwik Memorial Trust, 1987), p. 110 for details of Ghataks union activities. 9. For more details of Ghataks life and work in English, including a comprehensive filmography, see Rows and Rows of Fences: Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000). Some of the essays and interviews included in this collection were originally in English, and some have been translated into English from Bengali. Much of the material from Cinema and I has been reprinted in Rows and Rows of Fences. 10. The Partition of India in 1947 is commonly referred to as simply Partition". It should be noted that in addition to the 1947 Partition and the Bangladeshi War of Independences 1971 partition of East Pakistan and West Pakistan into Bangladesh and Pakistan, Bengal suffered another wrenching partition in the twentieth century Lord Curzons 1905 partition of Bengal (then a British province) into East Bengal and West Bengal. Britain reunified Bengal in 1911, but the provinces of Bihar and Orissa were created out of Bengali land and the central governments capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi, to be renamed New Delhi. For more on the 1905 division of Bengal see, Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903-1908 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1973). For more on the 1971 division of East Pakistan and West Pakistan, see Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 11. Ghatak instructed alternative directors such as John Abraham, Mani Kaul, and Kumar Shahani during his brief but influential time as an instructor and Vice-Principal at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune from 1964-1965. Beginning in the early 1960s, Ghatak suffered from alcoholism and mental illness. He was hospitalized for the first time in late 1965. For the rest of his life he was in and out of mental hospitals and psychiatric treatment. 12. From 1992-1997, I resided in Calcutta for extended periods of time for language study and dissertation fieldwork. During my various stays, I saw Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, which are in black and white, multiple times in 35 mm. For this paper I worked from excellent, unsubtitled video copies. To assist in translating the films dialogue and songs, I have copies of Ghataks subtitling spotting sheets (pages that correlate the dialogue with the footage of the film) that are in Bengali and English. The Ritwik Memorial Trust recently reprinted the complete film script of Meghe Dhaka Tara in Bengali, which I am also utilizing.

In 2002, the British Film Institute came out with a finely restored Meghe Dhaka Tara on video and DVD. 13. In Bengali, several words exist that have the connotation of refugee: chinnamul or uprooted; bastuchara or displaced person; sharanarthi or refugee; and, udvastu or homeless person. In the beginning of his article, Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition, Economic and Political Weekly (August 10, 1996), pp. 2143-2151, Dipesh Chakrabarty does an excellent job of detailing the significance of udvastu as one who has been placed outside of his ancestral, foundational home. 14. To illustrate the intense love and attachment that Bengalis had for pre-Partition Bengal, the subsequent tremendous sense of loss and nostalgia they experienced for their ancestral homes and motherland as a result of Partition, and Ghataks ability to tap into those emotions, I offer the following quote: There was a wound in the heart of my father, a raw wound. Many physicians were consultedto no effect; consequently, the wound did not heal. He carried this wound with him until the eve of his death. Toward the end of his life, he used to sit quietly. He saw Ritwiks Meghe Dhaka Tara ten times, Subarnarekha eight times and until the end of his life he carried with him Ritwiks Titas Ekti Nadir Nam. [A River Called Titas]... Father had no further opportunities to go to Bangladesh [formerly East Bengal]. This sorrow of not being able to return ate into him for the rest of his life. Father intentionally built his house close to the border [between West Bengal and Bangladesh]. He used to say that if I inhaled [the air] here, I would be able to smell the earth of Satkhira, Bagura and Jessore. And just to be able to smell this earth, Father would repeatedly watch [Ritwiks] Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha and Komal Gandhar. From Loken Rays, Madhokhane bera (A Fence in Between), in Pratidin, (September 1997). See also, Ranabir Samaddar, ed. Reflections on Partition in the East (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1997) and Chakrabarty, Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition. It is important to emphasize here that in his films, Ghatak does not often directly address the plight of Bengali Muslims in post-Partition Bengal. The narratives and main characters of his films primarily focus on Bengali Hindus. In his Remembered Villages, Chakrabarty succinctly articulates this fundamental problem in the history of modern Bengali nationality, the fact that the nationalist construction of home was a Hindu home. p. 2150. 15. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 92. 16. From an interview with Ghatak in Chitrabikshan Annual, (1975), as reprinted and translated in Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1987), p. 92. Also found in Bhattacharya and Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face , p. 67. 17. For a collection of articles on melodrama in Asian cinema, see Wimal Dissanayake, ed. Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for work on melodrama in 1940s and 1950s Hindi/Bombay film, see Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s, Screen, vol. 30, no. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 29-50; as well as his Addressing the Spectator of a Third World National Cinema: The Bombay Social Film of the 1940s and 1950s, Screen, vol. 36, no.4 (Winter 1995), pp. 305-324. Also see Ravi Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly the section entitled The 1950s: Melodrama and the Paradigms of Cinematic Modernity, pp. 99-142. E. Ann Kaplan, in her essay Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma, Screen, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 201205, urges film scholars to examine the relationship between melodrama and cultural or historical trauma, which I explore in my dissertation on Ghataks work. 18. The even larger Indian cinematic context includes other regional cinemas, such as Madrasi (now called Chennai) or Tamil film of south India. Stephen Hughes and Sara Dickey have conducted work in this area. For more on Satyajit Ray, see Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta: Orient Longman Limited, 1976), Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Darius Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

For more on Mrinal Sen, see John W. Hood, Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), Deepankar Mukhopadhayay, The Maverick Maestro: Mrinal Sen (New Delhi: Indus, 1995), Sumita S. Chakravarty, ed., The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000), and Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life. Politics. Cinema, 2002. 19. Vasudevan, Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture, in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 99-121. One of the main critiques of popular Indian commercial cinema that Vasudevan is referring to emanates from members of the Calcutta Film Society, particularly the writings of film critic Chidananda Das Gupta. 20. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, eds., Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 147. Rajadhyakshas Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982) is one of the first and few books in English to analyze Ghataks films. 21. In 1950s and 1960s Bengali commercial cinema, the melodramatic films of the star duo Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen also greatly added to the genres popularity. See Moinak Biswas The Couple and Their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama Now, in Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 122-142. 22. See Kapurs Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghataks Jukti Takko Ar Gappo, in her insightful and engaging collection, When Was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), pp. 181-200, and Shahanis various articles on Ghatak collected in Rajadhyaksha and Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, 1987. Additional compelling readings of Ghatak's films include Raymond Bellour's meticulous formalist analysis of Meghe Dhaka Tara, entitled "The Film We Accompany," and Moinak Biswas' examination of several of Ghatak's films in "Her Mother's Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak". Both of these essays are in Rouge, (2004) at http://www.rouge.com.au/index.html. 23. The Upanishads are philosophical and mystical texts of India, believed to have been composed from around 700 B.C.E. onwards. From Carl Jung, Ghatak derived the idea of the archetype. As Pravina Cooper has observed: The individual, Ghatak felt, needed archetypes or collective frameworks by which his unconscious could project into the conscious., p. 99, in Ritwik Ghatak between the Messianic and the Material, Asian Cinema, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp. 96-106. 24. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 8. 25. In Bhattacharya and Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak, Face to Face, pp. 76-88. 26. The Bengali folk dramatic form known as jatra (literally going or journey), combines acting, songs, music, and dance, and is characterized by a stylized delivery and exaggerated gestures and oration. Scholars believe jatra to have originated in the 16th century with the Krishna Jatra of Chaitanya and his devotees. After World War I, nationalistic and patriotic themes were incorporated into jatra. Mukanda Das (1878-1934) and his troupe, the Swadeshi Jatra Party, performed jatras about colonial exploitation, the nationalist struggle, and the oppression of the feudal and caste system. See jatra at http://banglapedia.com. 27. See Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic. For a good review of this book, see Jasodhara Bagchi, A Statement of Bias, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 3 (April-June 1983), pp. 51-62. For more on myth, archetype and ritual in Ghataks films see, Ira Bhaskar, Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 3 (April-June 1983), pp. 43-50. In Genres in Indian Cinema, Sanjeev Prakash describes Ghataks use of myth and metaphor as ultrareal, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 9 (Oct.Dec. 1984), pp. 23-33. 28. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, pp. 21-22. 29. Significant to Ghataks use of tradition or the traditional in the context of the modern or modernity

is Geeta Kapurs contextulization of the terms in Detours from the Contemporary (in When Was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, p. 267): The persistence of the terms tradition and modernity as they figure in third-world debates are best appreciated if we see them as notations within the cultural polemic of decolonization. They may be used in all earnestness as essential categories and real options, but in fact they are largely pragmatic features of nation-building and mark the double (or multiple) register of a persuasive nationalist discourse. Sufficiently historicized, both tradition and modernity can notate a radical purpose in the cultural politics of the third world. Certainly the term tradition as we use it in the present equation for India and the third world is not what is given or received as a disinterested civilizational legacy, if ever there should be such a thing. This tradition is what is invented in the course of a struggle. It marks off the territories/identities of a named people. In this sense it is a signifier drawing energy from an imaginary resource the ideal tradition. Yet it always remains, by virtue of its strongly ideological import, an ambivalent and often culpable sign in need of constant historical interpretation so that we know which way it is pointing. 30. Ghatak references Brecht throughout Rows and Rows of Fences, especially pp. 22 and 34, and Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face, particularly pp. 13 and 105. 31. Throughout the essays and interviews in Rows and Rows of Fences, Ghatak discusses the impact of these theatrical and cinematic forms and styles on his work. Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin and Bunuels Nazarin were two of Ghataks favorite films. 32. See Christine Gledhills excellent anthology, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Womans Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987). 33. The worship of Ma, the Mother Goddess (in the form of Durga), is a daily practice for many Bengalis. The Durga-Puja festival is the most important Hindu religious festival in Bengal. 34. For examinations of the relationship between music and image in film (although primarily Hollywood film), see James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, eds., Music and Cinema (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 35. Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia, p. 133. 36. A khayal combines the classicism of dhrupada (where the lyrics are lofty and are strictly developed without flippant embellishments) and the romanticism of thumri (light songs influenced by Urdu-Persian poetry and sung in Hindi). Khayals may be in praise of gods or royal patrons; they may center on divine or human love; and they may be devotional, philosophical or seasonal. For more on khayals, see Sumati Mutatkar, Aspects of Indian Music (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1987): 84-89. 37. For more on this trope in Bengali thought, see The Moment of Departure: Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankimchandra, in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books Ltd., 1986), particularly, pp. 79-81. For more on this trope in Indian film in general, see Rosie Thomas, Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989), pp. 11-30. 38. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 10. Also see Hamid Naficy, ed., home, exile, homeland: film, media, and the politics of place (London: Routledge, 1999). 39. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 10. 40. For more on Durga see Dulal Chaudhuri, Goddess Durga: The Great Mother (Calcutta: Mrimol

Publishers, 1984). The identification of Nita with Durga/Jagadhatari is clear in the film. Ghatak attests to this identification in numerous essays and interviews. See specifically, Haimanti Banerjee, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak: A Monograph (Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1985), pp. 56-57. For more on Uma, see Narendra Bhattacharyya, The Indian Mother Goddess (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977), pp. 62-63. 41. Ira Bhaskar, Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, Journal of Arts and Ideas (April-June 1983), pp. 43-50. 42. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 169. Earlier in this chapter, Naficy states: The space that exile creates in the accented cinema is gendered, but not in the binary fashion of the classical (i.e., Hollywood) cinema. And if gender is coded dyadically, the poles may be reversed. For example, the outside, public spaces of the homelands nature and landscape are largely represented as feminine and maternal. The inside, enclosed spacesparticularly those in the domestic sphereare also predominantly coded as feminine. In that sense, all accented films, regardless of the genre of their directors or protagonists, are feminine texts. These films destabilize the traditional binary schema gender and spatiality because, in the liminality of deterritorialization, the boundaries of gender, genre, and sexuality are blurred and continually negotiated. (pp. 154-155). 43.Gangar and Rajadhyaksha, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, pp. 51-52. 44. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 6. 45.These songs are called vijaya songs and express a mothers sorrow at the departure of her daughter for the home of her husband. In vijaya songs, the goddess Durga/Uma is represented as a typical young Bengali bride. Vijaya songs are usually sung at Umas departure on the tenth and concluding day of Durga Puja which occurs during the month of Asvin in September/October. For more on Kali and Uma in the devotional poetry of Bengal, see Rachel McDermotts nuanced research and translation work in her Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Also see Sumanta Banerjee, Marginalization of Womens Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 132-134. 46.I must point out here that the mighty Shiva of Aryan mythology is often depicted as a corpulent and indolent hemp-smoker in Bengali folklore, thus adding another layer of meaning to Nitas banishment and symbolic return to Shiva. See, Ibid, p. 133. 47.Geeta Kapur, Revelation and Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi , in Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, and Vivek Dhareshwar, eds., Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), p. 42-43. Also found in When Was Modernism. 48. For more on Rabindra Sangeet, see Jayasri Banerjee, ed., The Music of Bengal: Essays in Contemporary Perspective (Bombay: Indian Musicological Society, 1988), pp. 81-92; also, Sumati Mutatkar, ed., Aspects of Indian Music: A Collection of Essays (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1987), pp. 127131; and, Sukumar Ray, Music of Eastern India (Calcutta, Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay Publishers, 1973), pp. 161-188. 49. Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Publishers, 1980). 50.For more on the major themes of Tagore' s songs, see Banerjee, ed., The Music of Bengal, pp. 81-92; Mutatkar, ed., Aspects of Indian Music, p. 129; Ray, Music of Eastern India, pp. 168-175. 51. From a 1976 interview with Ghatak entitled, I Am Only Recording the Great Changes, reprinted and translated in Sibaditya Dasgupta and Sandipan Bhattacharya, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face, p. 110. 52. Rajadhyaksha, A Return to the Epic, p. 75.

53. For a short but informative piece on the Bengal Renaissance, see Sumit Sarkars Calcutta and the Bengal Renaissance, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed. Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I: The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 95-105. 54. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 5. 55. For more on Radha, see Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 56. In her dense and provocative piece, Moving Devi, Gayatri Spivak recounts the various deaths of Sati, in Cultural Critique, vol. 47 (Winter 2001), pp. 120-163. The Puranas are epic, mythological and devotional texts sacred to Hinduism and are believed to have originated during the first millennium C.E. 57.An Accented Cinema, p. 188. 58. For a relevant interview with Nino Rota, see Lilianna Betti, Fellini (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1979), pp. 154-164. 59. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 76. 60. Gangar and Rajadhyaksha, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, p. 62. 61.Naficy, home, exile, homeland, p. 4. 62.The piece is in a collection of Bengali essays on film by Ghatak, entitled, Chalachitra, Manush, Ebong Aro Kichu [Cinema, Man, and Something More], (Calcutta: Sandhan Samabayhi Prakashani, 1975), pp. 310 Q. Mr. Ghatak, what inspired you to turn to film making? R.G. You could say that I strayed into films down a zigzag path. If may father had had his way I should have been an income-tax officer. I got the job but left it to join the C.P.I. if I had stuck to it I might have become a Commissioner or Accountant General by now. But now I am only a street dog! After quitting the job I tried writing poetry, but found myself singularly incapable of it. I shifted my interests to writing short stories and won a bit of fame. More than a hundred of them were published in Desh, Parichay, Shanibarer Chithi and other leading magazines of Bengal. That was when I found that literature delves deep into the soul of man, but it works slowly. It takes a long time to grow roots inside. With typical adolescent impatience I wanted to make an immediate impact, because I felt the people should be roused instantly. Then a miracle happened the IPTA (Indian Peoples Theatre Association). First came Jabanbandi, then Bijon Bhattacharyas bombshell Nabanna. They showed me that, in terms of immediate and spontaneous communication, theatre is much more effective than literature. So I gave up writing stories and turned to writing plays and organizing theatrical groups. (Power of cinema) Then came another bit of heart searching. It was after my greatest success on stage a prestige performance staged in the Jadavpur University campus in 1950, to coincide with the convocation inaugurated by President Radhakrishnan. I produced Tagores Bisharjan in which I also played the leading role. More than 8,000 persons attended the show. It was fantastic! But this also showed me that I could only reach a maximum of 10,000 people through such a show. And so much collective labour had to be expended just for that! Then I decided to make films. Q. Did you realize your ambition through the film medium?

R.G. Looking back I can say that I have no love lost with the film medium. I just want to convey whatever I feel about the reality around me and I want to shout. Cinema still seems to be the ideal medium for this because it 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. They say that television may soon take its place. It may reach out to millions more. Then I will kick the cinema over and turn to T.V. Q. Can you recall any particular influence that inspired you to be a film-maker? R.G. Well, there were films like Eisenteins Battleship Potemkin, Pudovkins Mother, Krakatit the Czechoslovakian film Nema Barikada by Otakar Vavra and books like Eisensteins Film Form, and The Film Sense, Pudovkins Film Technique and Film Acting. Ivor Montagus collection of film articles in the Penguin series, and Bela Balaszs Theory of the film, all of which threw up a completely new world before my eyes. Most of the films which I have mentioned were banned in India at that time. We could only see them clandestinely. That also gave a romantic aura to the whole experience. And then came the first Film Festival in India which introduced us to the Italian neo-realists. This was yet another completely new and fascinating world. All these films and books helped to develop my tastes, but they did not influence me directly. I did not become a part of any school. Q. These persons you have mentioned, are they the greatest cineastes in your opinion? R.G. They are not cineastes and they are not dilettantes. They are more or less pioneers in exploring this exciting medium. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and, in a way, Dovshenko discovered a new artistic language in films. The first two were not only film makers, but were also among the first film theorists of the world. Film makers anywhere owe a debt especially to Eistentein. He have us a whole new medium of expression. Q. Films are still perhaps the most exciting mass medium in the world today. But few directors have cared to explore its vast possibilities. Which directors or schools of film-making, in your opinion, have been exceptionally successful? R.G. In my opnion Sergei Yuktevich and Louis Bunuel are the very greatest. But Yuktevich died recently and Bunuel, in disgust, has stopped making films as a protest against the commercialization of this great art from. Jean-Luc Godard says that as long as film-making is not as cheap as pen and paper in this bourgeois world, good flims cannot be made. I last heard about him a few months ago from a French journalist. He has stopped making films and whiles away his time on the boulevards of Paris and in doing party-work. Then there is a Japanese school. I am not talking about export quality film directions such as Akira Kurosawa but of directors like Mizoguchi, Ozu and Tanaka. Now there are some promising young directors among them, such as Nagisa Oshima. In South America we have Leopold Torre Nilson; in Greece there is Michael Cacoyannis and, of course, in Sweden there is Ingmar Bergman. I dont set much stoer by the so-called underground cinema of America, or by the British school, or by the clinically disinfected realism of poverty produced by directors such as Satyajit Ray. There is also a wave of pornographic films, which makes me furious. There may be other notable film makers but since the scope for seeing the latest works from abroad is almost non-existent in our country, I may have missed many remarkable works of art. Q. I notice that you have not included the Italian school or the controversial nouvelle vague movement. R.G. Well, the Italian school seems to me be a spent force. After the Italian spark of neo-realism, which ultimately turned into fantastic realism in the hands of great masters like Federico Fellini, Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and others, it has very little else to officer. The same is true of the Polish school led by Andrej Wajda and others. In the ands of people like Roman Polanski, it tended to go towards s ort of new-

existentialism. Polanksi has rightly found his heaven in Hollywood. About the nouvelle vague, the French have a peculiar fascination for giving a label and a name to anything and everything. To me the term nouvelle vague, is a very vague and fuzzy label to attach to films like Truffauts Quatre Cents Coups and the Resnais-Robbe-Grillet production lannee Derniere a Marienbad both in the same breath. They are as different as can be. So I cannot accept this as a school. But many of these film makers are most powerful, there is no doubt about that. I do nto know what the East-European countries are doing. Have you started thinking about your next film? Yes, I have thought a little bit about the subject. About a year and a half ago or maybe a year, I am not sure, I was in the hospital then I read in a newspaper that there was a girl named Bishnupriya in a village near Nabadwip. A bunch of wagon-breakers who have recently become neo-Congress pipe guns etc. started to chase the girl. Her only fault was that she was the daughter of a poor Brahmin and had no way of leaving the village. And she was beautiful. So the hoodlums "supposed to be neo-Congress" started to tease her. Ultimately they chased her into a corner near her house. Then the girl said ok, let me get inside the house and put on a nice sari and tried to run away through the back door, but the goons grabbed her, took her to the jungle "and they enjoyed her" all five of them, in succession. Meanwhile a reporter from the newspaper Satyajug who is also from that village reached there. On hearing him coming, they poured kerosene on the girls body and finally killed her by setting her on fire. I will make a film on this story. I have instructed Lokesh Ghatak to write a script. This is a fact and has been published in newspapers Satyajug did a big story on this. Will there be a connection to Bishnupriya, the historical character? Yes, naturally. Sri Chaitanyas first wife was Lakshmipriya who died from a snake bite. Then he married her younger sister and only after that he became Sri Chaitanya Deb. And as you know, he did not have any parallel there was no one anywhere near his stature in fifteenth-century Bengal. His second wifes name was Bishnupriya. "And as luck would have it", another Bishnupriya from the same village gets murdered. No matter which village you go to, you can hear the folk song "Sachi Mata go, aami juge juge hoi janomo dukhini". You will hear this in any village in Bengal. There will be a lot of cross references. I have given just a brief sketch to Lokesh, but he does not have all the details yet. You see, Naba Nyay had just been born in Bengal and Nabadwip was full of brilliant intellectuals. Not one, but in hundreds. All of them were highly educated and brilliant scholars. They used to sit by the river and then the debates and discussions would start to flow. Nimai Sannyasi was one of them. Smarta Raghu Mani was the last and the greatest smarto pandit he had the last work on Smriti. I will inter-cut all of these todays life and that life and put them side by side. We will have to write it well. Nyay, Naba Nyay a huge contribution, only from Bengal. And it will touch on whatever is going on in contemporary India. Thats it. No point in talking more about it. Have you ever thought of making films out of stories written by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay and Manik Bandopadhyay? I really want to film Chihna(dipanjan: a short story by Manik Bandopadhyay). Only if I can raise some money, because you know you need these businessmen. No one remembers Chihna any more, no one. I also want to do Putul Nacher Itikatha. I badly wanted to do Bibhuti babus Aranyak as well when it was being published in the periodical Prabasi, but someone else has already done it. And his Jatrabadal. Have you read it? It is a terrific story. I dont know if I will ever be able to do it because these businessmen are the intermediaries and they always create problems. They will never get it. Rabindranath? I had finished a script on Rabi babus Chaturanga and then I started talking to producers. I got lucky and someone agreed to finance it as well "one of the highest gentlemen in the film line". Bishnu Dey, the poet, settled everything for me because that man was a student of Bishnu Dey -- Hemen Ganguly. But ultimately I could not do it. I really really like Chaturanga. Almost all of Rabibabus novels are pretty horrible I mean

very affected, right? but in Chaturanga, he really cracked it. Incredible. There are only four real Bangla novels and it is one of them. Chaturangas Jyatthamashai, Sribilas, Damini unbelievable. So I started writing and the script was ready and then all of a sudden Hemenbabu dropped dead. What can we do? What are the other three? You mean in Bangla? Manikbabus Putul Nacher Itikatha, Rabibabus Chaturanga, Bankim Chandras Rajsingha these are the true great novels -- real deal. The fourth one? Oh, Tarashankardas another dead fellow Ganadebata. Thats it. There is no other novel in Bangla literature. Everything else is crap publishers still sell those and it all seems to be fine, but crap really. Stuff that women read after sending off their husbands to work or to the market. Just before their afternoon siestas, they take a pillow and those novels and then start to drowse off. Thats what we write nowadays and thats what they are good for (laughing). Aranyak did not quite reach the level of those four. Too much forth. Great writing no doubt, but has an overflow of emotion. Those four are precise. Just perfect. From a writers perspective, there is nothing above them. Do you want to talk a little about your filmmaking experiences events that you cherished or hated? There are tons of events and incidents like that. There is no point in talking about all that though. If you are working, those problems will always be there. What can I say about it? People who were with me and around me, they will talk about it. The final word is to summarize somehow I have survived. I survived (shouting). Section 2: Inspirations In the art of filmmaking, who have influenced or inspired you? And how those inspirations or influences have worked their way into your art? Its not just me, anyone in the world who is a serious artist, who has done any serious work in Bengal or elsewhere, anyone whose name you have heard -- each and every one of them is inspired by one individual and his name is Sergei Eisentein. We wouldnt know f of filmmaking if Eisenstein were not there before us. He is our father. Godfather. When we were young, his writings, theses, and his films made us go nuts. And those were not easily available back then. We had to hide them and import them very carefully. This man Eisenstein -- and you can ask Satyajit Ray, too, and "he will admit that he is the father of us". From him, we learned how to cut editing is the key to filmmaking. Then there is Pudovkin. He was here in 1949 and I was fortunate enough to meet him. Party instructed me to follow him, spend time with him and learn from him. Pudovkin told me something that is the basis of all of my education. He said: films are not made, filmmaking does not make any sense a film is built. Brick by brick, exactly like building a house. Thats how you build films, by cutting one shot after another. It is built, not made. These two individuals and then there is Carl Dreyer. I watched his films in Pune long time ago. The Passion of Joan of Arc. I totally lost myself after watching that film. And there is another person who I must admit to be one of my gurus. Luis Buuel. They are my true gurus. Oh, and Mizoguchi. After watching Ugetsu Monogatari, I was staggered, I mean I went completely crazy. Thats what a real film is! Everything I know about films, I have learned from these people. Will you talk about a few of the greatest films that you have watched? The greatest film you want me to name it? Battleship Potemkin. There has not been a film which can top that. None. The Odessa Steps scene no one will ever be able to shoot anything greater than that. Film is all about editing. Cutting, editing. The scissors are the films when to throw away, after exactly how many frames. The whole film depends on that. No one has created anything greater than Battleship Potemkin. Section 3: Challenges in Filmmaking and Film Criticism

In your experience, what has been the most difficult aspect of filmmaking and why? In my experience, there is only one difficult aspect of filmmaking. Only one and nothing else. And that is financing. Raising money and managing it are the biggest challenges. After that, my workers, my technicians and my artists will give their lives to do one great work of art. But getting the money and managing it is the only hurdle. Nothing else. Why is it so hard? Our social structure, what else. If I must talk about it, I will have to start talking about Marxism. These rogues and bastards, they are hoarding all the cash and are taking part in all sorts of vulgarity and mischief. They are the real troublemakers. If we could switch off these black marketers, that would solve it. You see for yourself, eleven thousand crore "white" money is circulating in our country and there are thirty-three thousand crore rupees in the black market almost the entire cash flow of our country is taking place in the black market. In the context of film production? No, I am not talking about just films - our entire society, economy have been taken over by these black marketers and their money "from all sides". And even the government of India has admitted that. Today the true worth of one rupee, after a continuous decline, has fallen to -- and Chavan admitted it -- thirty-six paise. In reality, it is just twenty-five paise. The value of one rupee is twenty-five paise. People cant eat because of inflation. This famine has completely exposed the entire system. What can I say? Films are nothing special. They are just a small piece in the whole puzzle. In filming great literature, what kind of difficulties does an artist face? Well, there has not been a whole lot of great literature in this country. If you want to make films out of whatever little there is, you must keep one thing in mind. Literature is one form of art and film is another. So when you are making a script out of literature, you can not just dumbly follow it. Thats not right. A film is primarily visual a visual art. This has to be kept in mind. Sound is secondary. Yes, it is important, too. It can help to move the images forward. Literature on the other hand is meant for reading. When you are reading a great work of literature, you feel great joy -- something that is born out of your refined taste for words. But "film is a performing art". It is about seeing, hearing. There is a hell and heaven difference between the two. So you must change. If the writers get mad because of that well, I have nothing to say. But the fact is they must realize that to translate from one medium to another and to make it work, you must make changes. Do you think the gulf that we observe between artistic excellence and its comprehensibility to an average moviegoer is desirable as a whole? No, no. There is no room for such silly questions. Why do you say so? In spite of everything, you are doing some good work. But a majority of people are not getting it. In this situation, how can we try to bridge this gulf and make the communication happen? Shouldnt we think about that I mean we want the audience to start thinking and reflecting Primarily, I could not care less. First, I do not live my life based on who accepts my work and who does not. And secondly, these questions are worthless. Please ask sensible questions only. What do you think about the role of a critic in understanding films? And here how the critics are The role of a critic is very important -- extremely important. Who is a critic? He is the bridge between a creative artist and audience. But we dont have critics like that in our country. One or two that we had are selling out, too. Since the commercial papers and magazines have bought them out, they do not dare to

write the truth any more. They have to obey orders all the time. And I cant convince you how valuable criticism is. I wont even try. You see, when George Bernard Shaw started to criticize English plays he was not a playwright yet the entire city of London was turned on its head. That is true writing! Here no one dares to write. There were a few who could do it. I know of a couple. Saroj Sengupta -- he used to write seriously. He was kicked out. And there is this other guy -- whats his name, hes in Anandabazar Jyotirmoy? No, no, no. N.K.G? No, no, not N.K.G. Ah, that other guy. Just now I am missing the name. I will let you know if it comes back. "These are the only two critics". And Shyamlal who is now the editor of Times of India. He used to be a film critic. Then they moved him and made him an editor. He got a Padmashree or something like that this year. So these are the facts. In this country, no one respects critics. A few good men who want to do honest serious work and they are removed very fast. And whats the point in talking about the rest? To criticize films, one must understand the medium first. Different aspects of films and the technical details need to be understood, right? Only they themselves can say how much of the process they really get. I am not going to comment on that. I am not going to get involved in any trouble. But the point is that, I have understood this. Ah!. That gentleman, I cant recall the name. He is the best in India from Anandabazar. Now he is with Desh and they dont let him write anything. Sebabrata? No, no, not Sebabrata. Very strange! The way I miss certain names from time to time! How important a medium film is in the context of cultural movements? I think film is an extremely important medium. But where are we using it in such a way? You all know whats going on. There is no point in discussing all this. In this country, film has become the crassest instrument of cheap entertainment. So, I am quite worried about future of films in this country. I have no idea what will happen in the future though. As an industry, film is capital-intensive. So how much dissident can it really be? Totally and absolutely. But it all depends on who are building the film. If an artist is fearless and not spineless, he or she can do anything. In their films, they can capture the struggles and plight of the entire universe. But what can we do if they dont? And usually they dont. Thats why our films have become so ridiculous. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all. Satyajit Ray (1) No Love for the Cinema In Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemens account of Ritwik Ghataks place in the history of Indian cinema, they propose Ghatak was truly an original filmmaker with no cinematic predecessors. Rather, they suggest that aesthetically his work can be placed alongside that of Bengali novelist Manik Bandyopadhyay (190856) and the teachings of his music forbear Ustad Allauddin Khan (2). Given this assessment, it is not surprising that some of the most intriguing comments made by one of Indias most well respected independent directors are about cinema itself. What is surprising is that Ghataks writings about the cinema regularly denounce a love for the medium. Instead, Ghatak drew a fine distinction between the opportunities offered up by the cinema and cinema itself, always insisting: Film is not a form, it has forms (3). Accordingly, it was the massive size of the film going audience, rather than a love for the cinema, that

Ghatak claims brought him to the business of films. The only special skill he perceived in the cinema over any other artistic medium was that It can reach millions of people at one go, which no other medium is capable of (4). Ghatak declared on a number of occasions that if some other medium came along enabling him to reach more of the masses, he would happily drop cinema and embrace that other medium. Equally at home writing fiction or theatre, Ghatak consistently investigated the question of whether filmmaking was an art form and what attributes made it such, remarking raw meat is not exactly Moghlai kebab. A cook comes somewhere in between (5). What mattered to Ghatak was that a work was artistically engaged. Ghataks work in the cinema itself never settled into any one genre of style. My first film was called a picaresque episodic film along the lines of the eighteenth century Spanish novel Gil Blas De Santillane; the second was called a film of documentary approach; the next was a melodrama, and the fourth, nothing at all, just no film. (6) An artist across many mediums, Ghatak wrote, performed in, directed and produced numerous plays on the stage and in the streets for the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA), the theatre branch attached to the Communist Party of India. His significant influence with IPTA is evidenced by his play Dalil (Document). It was voted best production of the IPTA All-India conference in Bombay in 1953. He formed his own theatre group, Group Theatre, following differences with IPTA, staging a play called Sei Meye in 1969 with the patients in the mental asylum at which he resided for some time. His film Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime or E-Flat, 1961) is about this split within the IPTA in Bengal, during the early years after Partition, and opens with a theatre performance of Ghataks Dalil, featuring many celebrated veteran IPTA actors, forging yet another crossover between media for Ghatak. Between Human, Camera and Machine So what are we to make of this director/writer/producer/actor/author of films/theatre/novels/short stories in short, a self-proclaimed artist who declared no attachment to a medium we, as cinema enthusiasts from all walks, claim to love? An anecdote about Ghataks own viewing habits might go a little way to explaining. I have been told that Ritwik Ghatak and Kumar Shahani (Ghataks prized pupil) used to watch the Lumires LArrive dun train la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station, 1896) over and over again, and laugh. They laughed because they found funny the idea of one machine looking at the other (7). Whenever I think about this anecdote, it always connects itself to the events of Ghataks film Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy or The Unmechanical, 1958). Set in Bihar around the activities of a taxi driver who lives at a bus station, it was Ghataks first film to be released commercially. Its just a lump of iron. Why this attachment? This is a question asked of taxi driver Bimal (Kali Banerjee, an IPTA veteran), the central character of Ajantrik, regarding his dedication to his very old and battered 1920 Chevrolet jalopy, called Jagaddal. It seems to me that it is the same question Ghatak wants to ask of the presumption of a filmmakers attachment to the apparatuses of the cinema an attachment Ghatak claims not to possess. We could draw some interesting conclusions about Ghataks investigation of this taxi drivers relationship to his car and Ghataks own attempts to explain what it is about the cinema that draws his commitment. Let us consider further the mingling of the human and the mechanical that traverses Ajantrik. The gentlemen at the Bengali Gentlemens Club. They put it well. Bimal pauses, pensively. That Im a machine. I like the smell of burnt gasoline. It makes me high A light giggle escapes him. What they dont understand is that Jagaddal is also human. Ajantrik The companionship Bimal feels towards his taxi in Ajantrik (which generates the accusation that Bimal must be a machine) in fact announces a profoundly human attachment and dedication motivating him.

Bimal holds onto his car, Jagaddal, for fifteen years, against the prevailing trend amongst his peers for ditching old cars and upgrading regularly to new fashionable whores. The sense of companionship between Bimal and his taxi is evident from the dialogue Bimal establishes with Jagaddal and his loving actions towards the car. Jagaddal is also invested with human gestures and locomotion. These are implied in Ajantrik by emphasis on Jagaddals bodily functions and independent agency, epitomised by the cameras attention to frequent autonomous movements of Jagaddals headlights. Sounds of drinking and exhalations of satisfaction exude from the car among descriptions of Jagaddals health and durability. According to Bimal, in comparison with other cars, Jagaddal never catches colds or gets tummy aches. That Bimal believes in Jagaddals independent agency is summarised in the final test of the cars strength, after it has received new parts. Ive pampered you enough, Bimal warns, dropping several large boulders that he can barely carry into the back of Jagaddal. Today you must decide whether you want to stay or not! When Jagaddal struggles with the load and collapses (effectively dies), Bimal smashes the windscreen and bursts into tears, his head resting on the steering wheel. Ghataks own comments about this relationship surprised me when I came across them as an already dedicated fan of the film. He is rather disdainful: Only silly people can identify themselves with a man who believes that that God-forsaken car has life. Silly people like children, simple folk like peasants, animists like tribals. To us city folks, it is a story of a crazy man. [] We could imagine ourselves in love with a river or a stone. But a machine there we draw the line. (8) At first I was taken aback by such a seemingly superior attitude towards the central character of Ajantrik, for whom I hold much affection and for whom I believed the film held a similar affection. However, while the condescending tone is evident in these comments, Ghatak maintains a significant sense of curiosity about this phenomenon. He begins to make some very interesting connections between some of the cultural traditions of India in relation to this machine. He continues: But these people do not have that difficulty. They are constantly in the process of assimilating anything new that comes their way. In all our folk art the signs of such assimilation are manifest. (9) At the same time as Ghatak discusses this capacity for assimilation common to children, simple folk like peasants, animists like tribals, he acknowledges the trends of the modern era: The order of the day is an emotional integration with this machine age (10). Here we discover a curious confluence between the practices of folk art and the attitudes resulting from industrialisation. Bimal is certainly not the first man to fall in love with his car. We can all think of city folks of similar persuasion. Ghatak, it seems, is in fact well aware of this: I have seen such men (I have had the doubtful pleasure of meeting Bimal himself in real life) and have been able to believe in their emotions (11). Surely we must acknowledge that the cinema and its apparatuses such as the camera are deeply engaged in this process of emotional integration with this machine age. Yet Ghatak is skeptical of this kind of emotional integration. This is why the director laughed when he saw LArrive dun train la Ciotat, describing it as one machine looking at the other and why he finds Bimal such a curiosity. In Bimal, we can envisage a loose metaphor for the quintessential filmmaker, defined entirely by his or her relationship to a machine that is his or her livelihood. Yet Ghatak resists offering Bimal as a portrait of himself because he refuses to accept any attachment to the cinematic medium, indeed to any medium in particular. He finds such attachment laughable, like many of Bimals detractors. He remains inquisitive about this phenomenon, however, drawing out the tension in Ajantrik between, on the one hand, a climate that encourages emotional attachment to machinery that constitutes livelihood, resulting in companionship, and on the other, a climate of constant upgrade that encourages discarding on a regular basis. Is Bimal an exemplary figure of the machine age or an anachronism? The unresolved tension between these possibilities feeds much of my own curiosity about this film.

Is it that Ghatak is uncomfortable with the kind of integration Bimal embraces and that the cinema potentially manifests because he perceives himself as a kind of universal artist hero, a Renaissance man in the shadow of his much admired hero Tagore? It seems it could be Ghatak who is anachronistic rather than his simple peasant folk and tribals. It is another interesting confluence: Ghatak, an innovative filmmaker, breaking and creating all kinds of cinematic rules and regulations, like Bimal, resisted the fashions of his day to respond in a certain way to his means of livelihood. The parallel between Ghatak and Bimal, then, lies not in their relationship to the machine age but rather to a sense of being isolated by a personal vision that goes against the grain. Further, both refugees of Partition, their sense of being out of place is magnified as individuals whose vision of the world differs strongly to many of those surrounding them. Partitioning Realities Ghatak was born on 4 November, 1925, at Jindabazar, Dhaka, the cultural centre of East Bengal (now Bangladesh), which had become, by the beginning of his filmmaking career, East Pakistan. At that time, Pakistan had a general ban on all Indian films. As a consequence, for the majority of Ghataks filmmaking career, his films could not screen in his birth city. Ghatak migrated to Calcutta in early youth, attending the M.A. class at Calcutta University in 1948. His films are heavily influenced by his personal experience of Partition. In our boyhood we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious. [] Our dreams faded away. We crashed on our faces, clinging to the crumbling Bengal, divested of all its glory. (12) Before I encountered Ghataks work, I knew plenty about Partition at the moment of its birth on the other side of the country the trains full of corpses coming in and out of Lahore, the attacks made on old friends and neighbours. With Ghatak, however, for the first time, I experienced the mindset of the refugees of Partition, without statistics, and also the particular experience of Bengal, about which I had heard little. For the first time, I was brought most relentlessly into time and space of those left homeless, crumbling on the faded outskirts of a nation, living out a divided Bengal. Ghataks pupil, Kumar Shahani, explains the importance of Ghataks approach to Partition as a radical political expression: The heroes and heroines of Ritwiks films, while their energies are sapped by a society which can sustain no growth, have inner resources that seem to assert themselves. [] He was extremely disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement. It is these factors that make Ritwiks films a vitally generative force for the young. He does not hide behind a medieval or a dead past or a decorative IndianessVery few of his contemporaries have avoided these pitfalls whether they work in the cinema and the other arts, or in the theoretical and cultural sphere. It is as if they were ashamed of being themselves, today, with their true history. (13) Subarnarekha This potent attitude to Partition distinguishes Ghataks work acutely from the films of those such as Satyajit Ray. The difference between the two can be described in this way: Instead of painstakingly trying to build up a realistic space-time, he would try to develop a story simultaneously on various levels, relying heavily on songs, melodrama and coincidences (14). Kaleidoscopic, relaxed, discursive, Ghataks uneven style manifests the deep tensions weighing from various directions upon his characters and the trajectories of their lives. Meghey Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Kormal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime, 1961) and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962) form a trilogy around the socio-economic implications of Partition. Ghataks own description of a moment in his film Subarnarekha (which, like Komal Gandhar, was an absolute box officer failure) set in a refugee colony, called Nabajeeban on the outskirts of Calcutta in the 1950s, illustrates beautifully his cinematic manifestation of Partition: When the camera suddenly comes to a halt at the dead end of a railway track, where the old road to East Bengal has been snapped off, it raises (towards the close of the film) a searing scream in Anasuyas heart. (15)

A Place in the Canon: Ghatak versus Ray Motivation for writing this profile arises partly from a desire to overturn, realign and respond to Satyajit Rays predominant position within the discourse of Indian cinema. I am aghast when I come across seemingly contradictory statements such as this one: It all goes to prove once again that Satyajit Ray is the exception who proves the rule of Indian filmmaking (16). Yet this statement captures perfectly a common general attitude about Rays place in Indian filmmaking history. The tendency, both in and outside India, to valourise the cinema of Ray as representative of everyday life in India or as representative of Indian cinema in general, is problematic. As a consequence of this tendency, other cinemas outside of the commercial mainstream that do not follow Rays distinctive model have had great difficulty registering their authenticity or authority to the viewing public, both indigenous and foreign. Ghatak is largely unknown outside India and outside certain Indian filmmaking circles, despite being regarded by Satyajit Ray as one of the best Indian directors of the twentieth century. This appears to be changing with increasing accessibility to his work and a successful retrospective of his work held in New York in 1997. Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak were in fact clearly admirers of each others work. Praise from both sides can be found in print on a number of occasions. Indeed Ray, a member of the Ritwik Memorial Trust, provided the foreword to the published volume of Ghataks writings on cinema in English, Cinema and I, reprinted in Rows and Rows of Fences. He is full of approval for Ghataks work: Ritwik was one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced. [] As a creator of powerful images in an epic style he was virtually unsurpassed in Indian cinema. (17) Likewise, in his Row and Rows of Fences, Ghataks praise for Ray is high: Satyajit Ray, and only Satyajit Ray in India, in his more inspired moments, can make us breathtakingly aware of truth, the individual, private truth (18). Rays Pather Panchali (1955) is lauded in Ghataks essay on literary influence in Bengali cinema: It is true that this film was also based on a famous novel. But for the first time, the story was narrated in the filmic idiom. The language was sound. Artistic truth was upheld. The fundamental difference between the two art forms was delineated. (19) In the essay Recollections of Bengal and a Single Vision, Shampa Banerjee offers an interesting anecdote from Dopati Chakrabarty about the relationship between the cinemas of Ray and Ghatak: Satyajit Ray once said: Had Nagarik been released before his Pather Panchali, Nagarik would have been accepted as the first film of the alternative form of Bengali cinema. (20) Nagarik (The Citizen), the first film Ghatak ever made, was completed in 1953 but in fact released posthumously in 1977. Pather Panchali was released in 1955. The central character of Nagarik, Ramu, opens the film looking for a job in Calcutta, while his family struggles to make ends meet. Incredibly, in a memorial lecture on Ghatak, given after his death, Satyajit Ray had this to say: Ritwik was a Bengali director in heart and soul, a Bengali artist much more of a Bengali than myself. For me that is the last word about him, and that is his most valuable and distinctive characteristic. (21) Given the incredible praise heaped upon Ghatak by Ray at such times, it is a wonder his work was not more widely received with open arms. Jacob Levich goes a little way to explaining in part the difference in the reception of these two filmmakers during their lifetime. Satyajit Ray is the suitable boy of Indian film, presentable, career-oriented, and reliably tasteful. Ghatak, by contrast, is an undesirable guest: he lacks respect, has views, makes a mess, disdains decorum. (22) Indeed, Siddharth Tripathy puts it well: if cinema were a religionRitwik Ghatak was a rare catholic from out country. (23) But whats not to like about a rebel? Edgy, uncouth, insulting, an alcoholic, Ghataks films are always challenging. They never make one feel comfortable. But why should they? My own response to

this issue of Ghataks status within Indian cinema is merely to frame the competing views on his worth that exist within the discourse of this cinema and its history. In order to account for Ghataks unpopularity with audiences during his lifetime, we must balance Rays praise for Ghataks work with the attitudes of those who sought to bring Ghatak into disrepute: The knowledge that Komal Gandhars box-office potential was sabotaged by people who were once his friends, deeply hurt Ghatak. It is to this day widely believed in Calcutta that the Communists and Congress joined hands to finish him off. A large number of tickets were bought by goons of both the parties who then disturbed the viewing of the legitimate viewer by sobbing loudly during funny scenes and breaking into uproarious laughter at the serious ones. The audience was alienated and the viewer-ship fell dramatically after a promising run in the first week. The film had to be withdrawn. He, being the co-producer, had to share the burden of the financial loss. It broke him. His descent into alcohol began soon after. (24) Cinemas Scars So it seems that the distress of Partition, ingrained in Ghataks very ability to perceive his surroundings, combined with an interest in extending the artistic possibilities of the cinematic medium, crystallised into something quite fascinating and unprecedented in Indian cinema, which was not well appreciated by many of his peers. What makes it so fascinating for me is not only a new outlook on the partitioning of India but, more importantly, the consequences of this for the cinema as a medium. It is as if the very frames and coordinates of his cinema regularly manifest the fracturing that took place with Partition. Cinema itself, it seems, must bear the scars of Partition as much as any individual or nation-state. Meghey Dhaka Tara A passing train cuts deafeningly across the background of a shot as Neeta sits with Sanat by the river in Meghey Dhaka Tara, overpowering the soundtrack entirely with its travelling wheels, piercing whistle and screeching breaks so as to drown out their conversation, sabotaging the spectators ability to hear. The sound of the railway, unreasonably loud given its position in the very background of the image, breaks open the soundtrack as if a crack has formed and the train has surged through it. At a later moment in Meghey Dhaka Tara, the camera positions close up under Neetas chin as the light shines on her glistening hair, giving the impression that Neeta is looking upwards to the twinkling light that reflects off her hair like stars. Suddenly a whip sounds repeatedly on the soundtrack over Shankar and Neetas singing, prompting her to sob uncontrollably for the first time in the film, under the burden she carries supporting her family and losing her own dreams. Here again, it is as if the soundtrack pierces the image, breaking its beauty and breaking Neeta too, breaking her down in fact. Meghey Dhaka Tara has an absolutely revolutionary soundtrack, which at times reaches an incredible saturation point. I felt, at times, as if the soundtrack would swell open or burst, almost as song, spoken word, the sound of Neetas dizziness, drums and her tuberculosis-induced coughing rose to compete in the mix. Bhaskar Chandavarkar gives an excellent account of Ghataks experimental work on the soundtrack: While mixing, he heard the whine of a projector leaking in from the projection room. Obviously, the glass pane on the projection room window was missing. A live track was also being fed into the mixer from the studio. Ritwik heard the whine a while and then advised the recordist to leave it that way. (25) In a portrait of Bimal left waiting on a railway platform, Ajantrik generates a framing that reminds me of a dynamic construction (26): Bimals head is cut off from his body while the rest of the frame registers clear sky. The particular angle of framing in this scene operates a kind of de-framing in the form of an abnormal point of view. Bimals floating head, framed with a piece of the sky, offers us a slice of space, emphasising the quality of framing as cutting (27) reminding us that the closed system of the frame is never absolutely closed (28). Rather, the internal composition of this unusually angled close-up denotes a Deleuzian affective framing, carrying off with a scrap of the sky and forming between it and the face, a virtual conjunction (29). Bimals face, extracted from its spatio-temporal coordinates, carries its own space-time (30). Here we must return to Kumar Shahanis comments about why Ghatak was such a vital force for young independent filmmakers such as Shahani who have since achieved significant influence and support for

their important work. As Shahani has explained, Ritwik Ghatak was disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement. What must be acknowledged is that Ghataks recognition and incorporation of this splintering into his work may have borne the cinema some scars but this scarring, this splintering and fracturing of a false unity in the cinema, generated significant new growth and development. Further, recognising and embodying the truth of his own experience of Partition in the cinema, forged connections that were profoundly true to the experience of Indian people, rather than what Shahani describes as a decorative Indianess. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema describes Ajantrik as: a new investigation into film form, expanding the refugee experience into a universalised leitmotiv of cultural dismemberment and exile evoking an epic tradition drawing on tribal, folk and classical forms (Buddhist sculpture, Baul music, the khayal). (31) This statement is key to understanding Ghatak because it links the refugee experience the experience of exile to folk and epic forms which together expand into an investigation of film form. These are the key elements of Ghataks originality in the cinema a potent mix. The folding in of all of these aspects produces cinema true to Ghataks experience of India in a form that others have found incredibly productive, as Shahanis comments illustrate. Meta-Cinema Ghatak had a philosophical attitude to cinema his work asks the question What is Cinema? Fleeting concurrence is the mainstay of Bimals encounters with other individuals in Ajantrik. An incredible yet fleeting encounter occurs between a woman Bimal collects once deserted by the local Romeo and her train arriving on the platform in front of her. This encounter, well outside the central drive of Ajantrik, has captured me completely. It deserves lengthy attention. A woman stares straight ahead at the edge of the railway platform in close-up as a train arrives at her station. Passing train carriages block the light and cast a panel of shadow so that the area underneath her eyes becomes darker, as if she is exhausted, harrowed, under-slept. The darkness under her eyes disappears when panels of light, unblocked by the train, travel over her face and again return with the passing shadows. The alternation of light and shadow traces the movement of the train onto her face. The train slows down as it pulls into the station, its pace measured by this movement of shadow. Ajantrik This womans face in Ajantrik becomes a reflective surface onto which the trains rhythm is traced, projected. The trains locomotion is reconfigured, temporally, by this trace. Her face, through the aspect of chiaroscuro, not only reflects the train but also refracts it into an expressive series. What results is that the trains conquest of space and time is turned off-course towards a quality that is outside its coordinates. The optical effects rendered upon this moment render the railway station and the woman, together, an anyspace-whatever (32), suspending their individuation to the creation of affect, performing the quality of the railway, rather than its function (33). The abandoned woman in Ajantrik has been stripped of her jewelry and status losing her distinctive adornments. It is the ordinary blandness of her features, unadorned, that allow her face to operate as screen for the projection of the shadow of the train. Yes, this moment of conjunction between face as screen and train as projection is also a meta-cinematic image. The ratio of light to dark projected onto her face is approximately 90% dark and 10% light exactly the ratio of light travelling through the film projector. The locomotion of the projector and the train merge and these moving shadows become a form of dynamic framing the frame as dynamic micro-movement (34) the frame passing over a still face. The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face. [] There is no close-up of the face, the face is in itself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, affection-image. (35) The railway, under Ghataks incredible close-up of a face, becomes an affection-image. This kind of transformative work Ghatak achieves in Ajantrik, in which the railway becomes the projector

and a human face becomes a cinema screen, shifts machines so that the apparatuses of the cinema become locatable inside the image. Meghey Dhaka Tara likewise performs incredible transformations, this time between the river and Neeta, who is the Cloud-Capped Star of the films title. The relationship between the river and Neeta begins as the running water of the river sparkles behind the title sequence like exquisitely formed twinkling stars. Later on, the moonlight reflecting off the river filters across Neetas face in the darkness of her bedroom suggest the passing clouds over the night sky and over her face. As Neetas situation worsens with Sanat, her sweetheart, marrying her sister Geeta tiny particles of light stream through the thin gaps between the bamboo strips woven to form the family hut, twinkling in a way that recalls the river of the title sequence, as Shankar and Neeta sing together. The camera closes in on Neetas despairing face, the light source catching her hair in the dark so that it becomes filled with sparkles. The stars shift from their source in the river (we never see them in the sky) to surround Neeta completely at her most desperate moments her face clouded in distress but shrouded by tiny twinkling, brilliant reflections. Under the Influence You Are a Fence Yourselves It seems that despite Ghataks claim to have been drawn to the cinema by the size of the audience he could reach, as Satyajit Ray has noted, Ritwik had the misfortune to be largely ignored by the Bengali film public in his lifetime (36). While Ghatak has been classified as a Great Director by the likes of Satyajit Ray, he was not placed in this category because of his popularity. With incredible moments such as the one described above between an abandoned woman and an approaching train, Ghataks most unwavering influence was on other filmmakers. While very few of Ghataks films were influential at the box office during his lifetime, his influence as a teacher at the FTII had a profound impact upon the trajectory of Indian independent cinema. Ghatak was an influential lecturer and vice principal at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune from 1966 to 1967. He says of this time: 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, Theres a new teacher, lets 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 havent. Some have stood on their own feet, some have been swept away. (37) Jukti Takko Aar Gappo The last film Ghatak completed was Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) in which Ghatak played the lead role himself an alcoholic intellectual with various nervous conditions, a state for which he was notorious among students. Much loved by students but suffering difference with the establishment, he lasted at FTII for only a few years. Ghatak passed away on 6 February, 1976, at the early age of fifty, leaving many unfinished projects. Always at odds with his requisite establishment, it seems, from IPTA to FTII, his influence was more wide reaching than might be expected. Reading recently Lalitha Gopalans book on action genres in contemporary Indian cinema, Cinema of Interruptions, I came across a reference to the influence of a group of directors Ghatak is famed for fathering: Consciously setting themselves apart from commercial cinema, films by Adoor Gopalkrishnan, G. Aravindan, Mrinal Sen, Girish Kasarvalli, Kumar Shahani, and Mani Kaul focused on social and political antagonisms to narrate their tales of disappointment with the postcolonial state while also conveying hopes for a different society. [] [T]heir films drew the urban elite to cinemas and shaped film-viewing habits by encouraging the audience to focus more intently on the screen. A substantial number of commercial films made in the late 1980s borrowed from these film making practices while continuing to improve on conventions of entertainment. (38) In line with this account, we could say that Ghataks legacy has been a kind of cinema that invites us to focus more intently on the screen. I like this idea. Interestingly, it might suggest a mode of contemplation asked of in front of great works of art, echoing Ghataks own claims to be an artist first and a filmmaker second. Certainly he has snubbed any value in entertainment as a filmmaking practice:

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. (39) So Ghataks cinema asks us to contemplate deeply of the universe to focus more intently rather than be entertained. This requirement appears to have proved unyielding in his lifetime and perhaps, still, for many of us today. So how can we access Ritwik Ghatak? How can we begin to watch his cinema? We can make an effort to judge differently if we can allow ourselves into to his particular cinematic rhythmic inflections. To this end, I must canvas here my own encounter with what Gopalan has described as Ghataks ability to make us focus more intently on the screen. There is a scene in Ajantrik in which two taxi drivers sit atop their car bonnets and sing (to themselves, it seems) from their guts in deep and bellowing voices, the one trying to drown out the other, in a contrapuntal cacophony. The whimsical singing of the two taxi drivers opens up a momentary pause, a delay in the movement of the film. Somehow, the camera frames this moment of vocal interweaving in Ajantrik so that it waits upon the drivers. It is scenes such as this one that have asked me to look and look again at Ghataks cinema, to inquire repeatedly into what Ghatak has achieved on the screen. I say that the camera waits or lingers on these two taxi drivers, partly because it is me who doesnt want this moment to end. It is me who holds onto this singing so that it lingers in the images that follow, me that tries to squeeze out the duration of this scene and stretch it from within, indulging. We can acknowledge that the spectator can open up a film by the desire to suspend and hold onto an image. Indeed, I must admit my own bias in writing this profile towards Ajantrik, a film for which I hold so much affection that it clouds my articulation of much of Ghataks other work which is less accessible to me. I too am a culprit of putting up a fence to Ghataks experimentations. You might have been a bit more indulgent towards us if you only knew how many fences we have to cross to make a film. [] Filmmakers like us will be gratified if people just accept the fact that we are fenced in. [] You are a fence yourselves, the most ominous, perhaps. (40) Examining the fences we put in place against Ghataks ambitious work should begin to open us up to this cinema. We too must bear his cinemas scars if we are to learn from his vision. - Calcutta Web Ritwik Ghataks cinema vividly illustrates the idea that it is about the flow of time. It is memory that links his characters to themselves and others around them as they swim against the murderous tides of history and politics. Time and remembrance flow out of each other. Seldom has such a thought been expressed with greater feeling or perception than in the eight feature films Ghatak made between 1952 and 74. There is lucidity in Ghataks cinematic vision that renders complex ideas simple. Early training in his gentleman-scholar fathers library reading the epics namely Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, Upanishads, Jatakas amongst others; and, soon after the writings of Marx, Engels and other western philosophers and a grounding in group theatre with Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) the cultural arm of the Communist Party of India made him realize the value of communicating with very large audiences. Unlike other film makers in the world espousing the Communist cause to whom religion was anathema and who took refuge in existentialism like Wajda and Godard, or a considered atheism like Eisenstein, political ideology and aesthetic expression were fused effortlessly in Ghataks cinema. Long before Fidel Castro discovered the virtues of non-interference with the religious beliefs of his party members in Communist Cuba, Ghatak had informed the Committee examining the ideological positions of IPTA and the CPI song squad it would be imperative to remember that the Indian people, and certainly the proletariat who had been sustained culturally/spiritually by the epics would be best served if the party and its

operatives read and appreciated these great books. - Partha Chatterjee, Outlook India Ajantrik / The Pathetic Fallacy (1958) Ajantrik / The Pathetic Fallacy (1958) Ghataks first film was Nagrik (1952) about a young mans search for a job and the erosion of his optimism and idealism as his family sinks into abject poverty and his love affair too turns sour. Ghatak then accepted a job with Filmistan Studio in Bombay but his different ideas did not go down well there. He did however write the scripts of Musafir (1957) and Madhumati (1958) for Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy respectively, the latter becoming an all time evergreen hit. Ghatak returned to Calcutta and made Ajantrik (1958) about a taxi driver in a small town in Bihar and his vehicle an old Chevrolet jalopy. An assortment of passengers gives the film a wider frame of reference and provided situations of drama, humour and irony. But perhaps his best work was Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960),the first film in a trilogy examining the socioeconomic implications of partition. The protagonist Neeta (played by Supriya Choudhury) is the breadwinner in a refugee family of five. Everyone exploits her and the strain proves too much. She succumbs to tuberculosis. In an unforgettable moment, as the dying Neeta cries out I want to live, the camera pans across the mountains accentuating the indifference and eternity of nature even as the echo reverberates over the shot. Ghatak followed it up with Komal Gandhar (1961) concerning two rival touring theatre companies in Bengal and Subarnarekha (1965). The last is a strangely disturbing film using melodrama and coincidence as a form rather than mechanical reality. Unfortunately for Ghatak his films were largely unsuccessful, many remained unreleased for years and he abandoned almost as many projects as he completed. Ultimately the intensity of his passion, which gave his films their power and emotion, took their toll on him, as did tuberculosis and alcoholism. However he has left behind a limited but rich body of work that no serious scholar of Indian Cinema can ignore. - Upperstall When one closely looks at any of his films, one can witness the chaos with which his movies are cut; from high, to abrupt low or from wide lens to his sudden shift to telephoto lens and vice-versa, but within the schema of such chaos lay the harmony. Ghataks mise en scne is the representation of such harmony, which was made amidst the chaos of money, depression and desire reflected beyond the mimesis that Ghataks captured and represented. His mise en scne that was largely built on the foundation of various influences scars and nostalghia which he had been bearing with him for years. Also his choice for every movement of the camera, every gesture of the character and every relationship that the shot, the setting and the subject expressed reflected his deep longing and desire. () His usage of the wide angles lens in capturing and representing the exteriors that he so fondly captured is indebted to his memories of his growing years in Bangladesh. Its precisely the reason why most of his characters in the trilogy are always lost in the spaces which they inhabit and are in incessant search for something or longing. The search and longing that were expressed through music were an important source, not just to add depth to his expression, but it also became a catalyst for exposing the inner truth when fused with his montages.() Normally most melodramas are classically constructed and the mise en scne also moved in that pattern, Ghataks does just the opposite, his film cuts at odd angles; from high to low, low to high and juxtaposes odd angles. This is an important distancing technique he has used in his montage. Now this shift from different odd angles creates a chaos that could have made his entire work and especially this trilogy

unwatchable, but its the genius of Ghataks that he could blend seamlessly such distinctive angle and cuts, and form such poetic rhythm. Furthermore, his montage and his mise en scne were guided by his mastery over different modules of sound effects. That gave a distinctive tension to the expression he usually brought out from the sequences. - Nitesh Pahwa, Indian Auteur Ritwik Ghatak Reinventing the Cinema Jonathan Rosenbaum ROUGE to Index of Issue 10 to Next Article to Previous Article to Subscribe page to Rouge Press page

I have no way of knowing if Ritwik Ghatak ever saw Jacques Tatis 1953 masterpiece Mr Hulots Holiday, but when I look at his second feature, Ajantrik (1958), its hard not to be reminded of it. Tati discovered with that film while introducing his most famous character, Hulot, who went on to appear in his next three features (Mon Oncle [1958], Playtime [1967] and Trafic [1972]) that he didnt even have to appear onscreen every time he wanted Hulot to be evoked. All he had to do was duplicate the sound of Hulots car a rattling antique and an embarrassment that very early on in the picture becomes closely associated with him, identifying him from the outset as the odd man out among vacationers at a summertime beach resort. Theres a similar association made between Bimal (Kali Banerjee), the cab-driver hero of Ajantrik, and his own broken-down car. The fact that this car has a name, Jagaddhal, and is even included in some rundowns of the films cast, also seems emblematic of this special symbiosis. And its interesting that Ghatak also uses some artificial-sounding noises on the films soundtrack that oddly evoke science fiction, as if to express his fascination, his bemusement and amusement, with Bimal talking to and more generally treating his 1920 Chevrolet as if it were both a living creature and an extension of his own personality. (In interviews, Ghatak stated that he spent many years thinking about the philosophical implications of this relation between man and machine a relation that seems especially pertinent to the technology of film itself.) And offscreen as well as onscreen, the various sounds that Ghatak uses to characterise this vehicle through various stages of health and fitness are a major aspect of this films tragicomic tone as important as the music, or the sound of Bimals weeping when Jagaddal finally and irrevocably breaks down. The sound of this wreck being pulled away in the final scene is especially harsh and poignant, yet the sound of the detached car horn still wheezing and honking when an infant squeezes it allows the hero some sense of triumph and joy in the films final shot. In short, we have to acknowledge that the sound of this picture is far more than a neutral accompaniment to and counterpart of the images. And more generally, when we consider the soundtracks of some of Ghataks other features, such as The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), it is tempting to imagine that Ghatak in effect created these features at least twice once when he shot them, and then once again when he created their soundtracks. On the British Film Institutes DVD of this film, there is a detailed introduction by the former Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm that puts much emphasis on its sound. Although Malcolm speaks of the film having an innovative use of natural sound, which I rightly or wrongly interpret as direct sound, Ive been told by Ghataks son Ritaban that none of his fathers films employ direct sound and that all of them, by technical necessity, are post-dubbed. But this latter fact only emphasises the degree to which Ghataks soundtracks

are composed, and what I find most striking about his highly unorthodox methods of sound composition are the ways that they essentially rethink the dramaturgy of the visuals, and affect the ways that we look at these visuals by drawing our attention towards certain details and away from certain others. This principle is facilitated by the way that Ghatak seems to compose both his visual mise en scne and his aural mise en scne in discrete layers. He frequently employs deep focus cinematography, permitting a certain counterpoint between background and foreground details that on occasion reminds me of the early films of Orson Welles. (The last time I saw The Cloud-Capped Star, at the Ghatak retrospective held at the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea, I was especially struck by certain similarities to Welles second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] another tragic portrayal of the shifting fortunes of a family set against a larger backdrop of a culture in relentless decline, with a great deal of emphasis placed on the sacrifices made by some of the family members.) And Ghataks sound is often layered between music, dialogue and sound effects that can be naturalistic (such as the sound of food cooking on a grill, which Malcolm mentions) or expressionistic (such as the recurring sound of a cracked whip, which Malcolm also mentions). Much as our visual attention can shift in certain shots from foreground to background and back again because of the construction of the layered images, our aural attention might shift at times between music, dialogue and sound effects, which might in turn affect the direction of our gaze in relation to those images. There are two basic ways that a filmmaker can relate to film history: to work within an existing tradition or to proceed more radically as if no one else has ever made a film before. I think it would be safe to say that at least ninety-nine per cent of the films we see in theaters are made according to the first way. The Danish narrative filmmaker Carl Dreyer and the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage are two of the rare exceptions who might be said to have followed the second way. Even though they too both worked to some extent in existing traditions, their principles of editing and camera movement and tempo and visual texture are sufficiently different to require viewers to move beyond some of their own habits as spectators in order to appreciate fully what these filmmakers are doing artistically. Without making such an effort at adjustment, ones encounters with the films of Brakhage and Dreyer are likely to be somewhat brutal in their potentiality for disorientation. Ghatak, I believe, is another rare exception who followed the second route I have described, and one who provides comparable challenges of his own. And his methods of composing soundtracks for his films as well as his ways of interrelating his sounds and images are among the things I would point to first in order to describe his uniqueness as a filmmaker. One might conclude, in other words, that he reinvented the cinema for his own purposes both conceptually, in terms of his overall working methods, and practically, by rethinking the nature of certain shots he has already filmed specifically, by starting and/or stopping certain kinds of sounds at unexpected moments, sometimes creating highly unorthodox ruptures in mood and tone. 1. These are collected in Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000).

It might be argued that these ruptures were not necessarily intentional. At least Ive found no acknowledgment of them or of many of Ghataks other eccentric filmmaking practices in his lectures and essays such as Experimental Cinema, Experimental Cinema and I and Sound in Cinema. (1) But by the same token, I find little if any acknowledgment by Carl Dreyer of his unorthodox editing practices in his own writings. And the issue of artistic intentionality remains a worrisome one in any case, because artists arent invariably the best people to consult about their own practices, and it can be argued that what artists do is far more important (at least in most cases) than what they say they do. And the radical effect of Ghataks ruptures in his soundtracks strike me as being far better illustrations of his manner of reinventing cinema than any of his theoretical statements. To put it as succinctly as possible, they reinvent cinema precisely by reinventing us as spectators, on a moment-to-moment basis, keeping us far more alert than any

conventional soundtrack would. And this makes them moments of creation in the purest sense. Ghatak took one rupture in the history he witnessed as central the partition of Bengal. As he went on extending that event into a metaphor for everything that was alienating and destructive in the experience of his community, and talked about the pervasive degeneration of his country sometimes solely in terms of it, he faced puzzlement and even incomprehension from his contemporaries. Wasnt he being obsessed with a single event? Wasnt he living in the past, cutting himself off from the contemporary? The full irony of the situation is probably now coming to light: the Partition a joint treachery committed by the colonial power and the nationalist leadership cost millions of lives (mainly in Punjab and Bengal, but also in other provinces as the communal riots spread) and left millions homeless (11), but had hardly any thematic impact on film or literature. People forgot to talk about it. In the face of this silence the history model of narration itself had to be played with, it had to be crossed with elements borrowed from traditional community-centred forms epic, chronicle play, allegory, musical theatre. But in the face of historical denial Ghatak would also resort to a drama where a few hapless characters would say just that we deny it. These are people who howl against the rocks that they want to live, who place negation against negation by closing the circle before violent interdictions of change. A particular kinship relation takes on an acute dimension in this drama. It works to defeat the melodrama of couple formation even as it destroys the logic of the other, pre-bourgeois melodrama: the feudal family romance. - Moinak Biswas, Her Mothers Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak, Rouge. I was drawn to consider Ritwik Ghatak because of the dedication by Mira Nair at the end of The Namesake, a film I am using again as part of a course on diaspora cinema. Nair was referring to the Masters of Bengali Cinema with Ghatak alongside Satyajit Ray. But she might also have been referring to a master of diaspora cinema or more properly exilic cinema. () Ghatak is not as widely known as he should be (i.e. outside the circle of serious cinephiles and historians of Indian Cinema). He was at least as important as his contemporary Satyajit Ray and in some ways more so, given his brief stint teaching at the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) at Pune in 1966 in which he influenced future directors such as Kumar Shahani and John Abraham. His fame has spread outside India over the thirty years and more since his death. Its perhaps not so surprising that Ghataks work is not immediately accessible to audiences. He avoids the populism of commercial cinema, yet doesnt have a coherent humanist art cinema style like Ray, or even a committed political stance like Mrnal Sen. In the same sequence, he might move from what appears to be a conventional social realist approach to portraying village life/city life to a highly expressionistic portrayal of a moment of emotional tension. On closer inspection, however, his seemingly conventional realist camerawork is often undermined by staging in depth with disturbing angles and compositions. Music is integral to the trilogy of exile films (which includes the earlier A Cloud-Capped Star (1960) and Komal Gandahar (1961)). Cloud-Capped Star shares with Subarnarekha a brother-sister relationship in which the woman is a singer of Bengali songs, many written by Rabindranath Tagore (1876-1941), the towering figure of Bengali literature. - venicelion, The Case for Global Film Some critics accuse Ghatak of being oversentimental about desh or homeland. With him, they feel, the experience of Partition remained imprisoned in nostalgia, never a noble emotion, however painful its portrayal may be. According to Iraban Basu Roy: Partition was Ritwiks own passion but that passion did not get any creative inspiration or language in his films. Not that he was not aware of rootlessness; but whenever it came to representation of collective tragedy that surpassed personal pain, it seemed that Ritwik withdrew his passion So Partition remained loosely attached to his films, never turning into the central motif. That the Partition was not of a particular moment, but had long drawn effects on the personal and collective consciousness is understood in a film like Shyam Benegals Mammo; this extended influence is missing in Ritwiks films. Except for a few stray moments, there is no permanent depiction of the pain, harassment and nightmare of the Partition in his

films. Like Bengali fiction, Ritwiks films too just make stray references to it. On the other hand, like many other myths about Ritwik, a baseless myth about the Partition also got created. Madhabi Mukherjee, the actress who played the role of Sita in Subarnarekha, once told her interviewers that when the film was being made she was too young to ascertain fully the intensity and depth of Ghataks personal feelings about the Partition. But she mentions that at times Ghatak used to say, Lambu (tall one, meaning Satyajit Ray) never experienced Partition. She also emphasizes the fact that even in a traumatic film like Subarnarekha, Ghatak, the tragic bard of Partition, ends on a note of redemptive hope. In an interview published in The Statesman, commemorating forty years of the making of the film, Mukherjee syas: No matter how deep the tragedy is, how intense the suffering, the filmmaker refused to end on a totally negative note. Remember the last phase of Subarnarekha where the child is pulling his uncle to take him to the land of butterflies and beauty? Or the unforgettable lines of Tagore: Joi hok manusher, oi nabajataker, oi chirajibiter (Glory be to man, to the newborn, to the eternal) with which the film ends? Partition was indeed the single most traumatic experience for him, but Ritwikda did not stop there. He did not conform to any particular discipline. However, he was steadfast in one aspect he refused to accept the defeat and degeneration of human beings as final. He hoped against hope. - Somdatta Mandal, Constructing Post-Partition Bengali Identity through Films. Published inPartitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement. Edited by Anjali Gera Roy, Nandi Bhatia. Published by Pearson Education India, 2008. pp 72-73 Subaltern Cinema is proud to present an excerpt from the thesis submitted by noted Indian filmmaker Ritwik Kumar Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954. It remained undiscovered till 1993. The thesis remained buried for many years, and was only discovered in old files in the Communist Party Office. Going through the thesis, it becomes vivid that the same situation persists even today. As a result, such a strong pen is relevant till this date. Preamble to the thesis: We are witnessing a curious phenomenon today. We are witnessing an unprecedented expansion of progressive influence in the cultural sphere. Through their art, many common artists, from professional and other fields, are indicating that they are drawing closer to the people. Artists are taking up the cause of the people. What is curious in it ? It is a matter of rejoicing for us. But it is curious all the same. It is curious because no Communist artist is working among them, no Communist influence by example is guiding them today. In fact, our artists in those spheres are miserable figures and are glad, for all practical purposes, to remain so. This is curious. This is not curious, it seems monstrous when we think of our current smug complacency. We are hurrying and bustling and talking and running, and all the while we are actually sitting on the movement. We, the Communist artists. Not a single art-work of high value has come from us in the last four years. We are reviving our past work, rehearsing and giving it a new name, or else creating Amateur, third-rate work. And all the while, we remain talkers-in-chief.

This is definitely monstrous. And the few truly creative artists among us are moving further away from the Party day by day. The facts are telling us so. If and when asked, we have stock answers. The most repeated among them are : There is a lack of any Party Lon on culture, or, The Party itself does not care, and even, The Party is happy about the way we are working, and sometimes, Joshis Golden Period should come back again for the sake of Culture. Often, in reply, one receives the cold shoulder. Any uneasy question will immediately draw vague allusions to the condition of the Party, the Country, the Organization, and then, silence. Yet another answer given in reply to the query concerning high art-work, is given in the form of statistics, such as how many times the Partys works have been issued and how many cadres and groups of workers and employed. Have they no value ? This is the crux of the matter. Everything has value; but when one loses proportion, one substitute the value of one for the value of the other. It seems that we are doomed to remain where we are today. It is an injustice to solely blame ourselves, though to our minds, we have had too much justice and deserve some injustice for a change. Anyway, the Party must be criticized. It is, in fact, the nonchalant manner of the Party that has allowed these things to grow. The Party generally see the Cultural Front in two ways one, as a money earning machine (these are harsh words we know, but they just can not be helped), and, two as a mobilizer of meetings and conferences to keep the crowd (and not masses) engaged with whatever the artists can offer. Even when the Peace Council of similar body presents a slogan on Culture, the Party, through its Committees, calls on us to execute the routine. This is disheartening. More disheartening is, whenever anything concerning culture comes up, even serious comrades of the Party Committees become reticent and diffident: That is culture, comrades, and we know nothing of your problems. We have such and such jobs at hand, we have such and such engagements, and so-and-so is busy with those problems. We are overworked, we are fighting to cope with the sudden expansion of the Partys influence, with the building of mass organizations, and with the Democratic Front some other time, comrades. That other time never comes. At least it has not come in the last few years. Something or the other bobs up like the proverbial Cromwells head, and the attention of the Party becomes focused on it. This is extremely disheartening. It is sad, but truthful, to admit that if we want to get the attention of the party, we must show the benefit that will accrue to the Party as a whole, and to Culture. At present, the Party is more interested in taking things from Culture. It is very difficult to determine how much the Party cares for culture as the property of the people. It is also sad, but truthful, to admit that all that we and other comrades are saying, demonstrates a singular lack of understanding of what is needed, what we are losing, and which way to go. Such is the condition today.

It has to be unequivocally declared that the problem of culture is basically the problem of organization at the level of the Party, the Platform, and Art. It has to be unequivocally declared that the attitude of difference of the comrades, however sincere, is broadening the gulf between the Party and the culture workers. It has to unequivocally declared that what is needed from the Party is simply their undivided attention. The comrades themselves are able to solve the particular problems of art. It has to be unequivocally declared that the party is losing a lot from this attitude and is allowing potential danger to develop within Party. It has to be unequivocally declared that our lack of creation is not the result is a lack of a Party line on Culture, but due to a lack of an organized and serious effort on our part. It has to be unequivocally declared that we are not seeking a Golden Period, but a proper place in the body of the Party, and our share in Party rights and responsibilities. Today, all these have to be unequivocally declared and in clear-cut language, so that the Party can impose discipline on the Cultural Front, we can understand our tasks in building the Democratic Front, and people can be roused and enthused through our art-work. This task is the order of the day. This task has to be executed today. We propose, in this paper, to show that the problems [Party's lack of a cultural line] are of an organizational, not ideological nature. Organization is the key to the whole problem. We shall divide our discussions into three parts, all revolving around the central point of organization; we will then try to arrive at a conclusion. We shall take up special problems pertaining to our work and we hope to show that they can be solved. In our work, through our own art and platforms, we came into contact with the Party and the people. They present three sets of problems, though intricately interconnected. We have tried to remember this fact in our discussions. We hope that the Party will circulate this among the comrades. We are putting forth what needs to be stated, in the form that we think will best clarify our points. Such straightforwardness, we think, is the order of the day. We know that just to express all that we hold dear and to present that expression to the masses, with quality, is our task as Communists. We also know that the moment we start to do this, the other side [Bourgeois culture] becomes immediately important, because we may lose balance and defeat our own purpose by becoming isolated. This is a problem of a two-pronged offensive. How should we proceed ? We must proceed by admitting that in relation to Bourgeois culture we are, indeed, in a very bad state. We have to take all this is good in that culture, which it contains in profusion. Then we have to reshape that culture to achieve our goals, and to harness it to our purpose. Then, we will come to logical conclusions that are inherent in Bourgeois culture and are crying for release. Our comrades should creatively work among these artists in order to learn their melody and speech and method of their utterances; that is, to learn their form, their mode of handling philosophic content. This form is of decisive importance today. To understand this form means learning the trade, in its variety of uses and approaches. It means studying the past with scrupulous care, and learning the experiments and achievements of the past. It means learning the whole process; from the inception of theme-content

through stages of development, to the final art product. It means learning the other truths; these are the secrets if inspiration and intensity and sublimity of feeling. And finally, it means learning that this process is not simply 2 + 2 = 4; we cannot rigidly fix the phases of the process, because it is a creative process. Actually, we have so much to learn indeed ! And in such manners, haste and sweeping measures are the worst possible things. Slogans will never do here; slow, methodical, tenacious work is what is necessary. From the beginning, and to the end, it is an adults business. Our dramas, our Regisseurs production services, our Composers songs, and other creative work should be continually pushed towards common artists. We must strive to make them accept such primary works so that they may understand and then respect our sincerity, honesty of purpose and artistic caliber. We do not mean the non-Party minority (who are else sympathizers), who are with us today and who are a more valuable possession; we mean real nonParty people and real artists specialists of high standing ability. To push our major creative works towards and among these common artists and to make them accept these works is no mean job. It can only be done in one way with high artistic value and sincerity of content. There is another point of contact from our point of view a possible source of reserve forces, a potential sinking fund, so to speak: the Amateurs of the localities. We have already said that from the overall Party point of view, these Amateurs are treated as a part of mass organization building problems. Generally, we cannot except any radical change in this approach. But we must understand that we have to look at them from that perspective, and at the same time, from the standpoint of Culture. They are the breeding ground, the fountainhead, the source of new cadres. We must work among them to become more serious. This is the point. Among them [Amateurs] there are sparks. In all probability, there are more sparks in them than are dreamt of by many of us. Those sparks, if developed, will last longer, fade slower and be brighter than many. But they are rarely found in that illuminated state. We have to search for them. That is the main reason why they [Amateurs] should be drawn into the Federation. If we find one Sarat Chandra, one Nazrul, one Mukunda Das, our job is well done. And we will be well paid. Because such artists from among the workers and peasants, if developed and not spoilt by glorification, will see the whole thing through and fight to the last. From our standpoint, this is why we should work among the Amateurs, teach them and bring them into the Federation. To guide the whole Federation in our direction, we must form a Central Forum from which we will be able to propagate our theories and practices of art. Such a place, such a Forum, is an Academy of histrionic arts and conservatoire for music. In such an Academy, theory and practice of art forms may be encouraged to think. That is what is needed. If we succeed in making common artists and Amateurs consistently and logically think, our job is half done. Logical thinking gives birth to analysis of oneself and ones art. That is bound to reveal the pattern and hence, bound to bring into sharp relief the historic task of the artists. This [logical thinking] will help build the necessary atmosphere for a serious attitude that will guide them on to new pastures and also make us conscious of the magnitude of our task. Such an academy, where eminent specialists can and must be mobilized for teaching, is the order of the day. This one organizational

stroke will immensely help in building a Democratic Front. In such academies, we can inculcate Marxist thought in a much more interesting manner than is otherwise possible. And the, and only then, can we derive the full benefit from the policy of keeping MODELS in practice. We must relentlessly pursue and strive to establish theory as the most important perspective of the Academy; we must strive to demonstrate practice through our group actions and creative achievements. This is the proper relation. These are very hard tasks; but these are the tasks. All these, when co-ordinated, weighed, checked, complemented by new thoughts, and constantly kept on the proper level by tireless vigilance, will see the building of a Democratic Front in Collective Arts the most popular art forms. We have to come to grips with these problems, tackle them and will be solved. In order to achieve this, we will have to regroup our forces. We have to think in terms of available human materials, and position our cadres in the most effective manner possible. Our Party artists have to organize these tasks and execute them. There is no such occupation as an Art-organizer; it is a monstrous tautology. No such job exists. The nature of the task indicates that only artists can handle the job. Non-artistic Art-organizer will solve the problems to the exact extent that Eskimo hunting songs will rouse and guide Hottentots to revolutionary action! This is not a mass-organization where problems are of a general nature. This way of thinking is shallow and a dangerously wrong approach to organization building. All the tasks here are to be executed by the artists themselves, because Communist artists are the organizers. We must regroup our forces, find slogans corresponding to the stage of development, put emphasis where it is necessary, allot tasks, and watch. Continually, systematically, thoroughly watch and account and control on all levels; these are the weapons to be used. From the Party point of view this is the most important job in the Federation. The success of a Democratic Front depends upon this work. This is a task of FACTIONS at all levels. Such is the nature of our task concerning a Democratic Front and our hegemony in culture. This is our approach to the People. For, the artist reaches out to the People, his public, through the platform where he is creatively employed. Such is the problem of mass contact in our activities. The multicolored pattern of Ritwik Ghataks 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 hadnt 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 wasnt made for that sort of thing. I couldnt 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 peoples 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, Ill abandon films..I have wanted to use the cinema as a weapon, as a medium to express my views. - Premendra Mazumder, Ritwik Ghatak: The Committed Creator Her Mother's Son Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak Moinak Biswas ROUGE to Index of Issue 3 to Next Article to Previous Article to Subscribe page to Rouge Press page

1. Ritwik Ghatak, 'Ekamatra Satyajit Ray' in Chitrabhash 18:1-2, 1984, p 108.

2. Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Aparajito, 1931.

3. A close look at the Apu Trilogy as a whole, however, would reveal that Ray follows the novelist's cue more closely than Ghatak's comment would suggest. He introduces naturalist dispersal into the realist narrative and works with an incomplete separation between the individual and the natural horizon.

4. Foreword to Ritwik Ghatak's Cinema and I, 1987, reprinted in Ritwik Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) p. ix.

5. Marie Seton was one of the first critics to use this term in her essay 'New Wave in Bengali Films' (1960), cited in Rajat Ray, 'Paschatya Samalochoker Dristite Ritwik Ghataker Chhabi' in Ritwik O Tar Chhabi, Vol. 2, ed. Rajat Ray (Calcutta: Annapurna Pustak Mandir) pp 112-116. 6. An example of this would be Amiya Kumar Bagchi's 'Ritwik Ghatak', Frontier, July 7, 1984, where he tried to read Ghatak's work in conjunction with the 'conservative' tradition of 19th century Bengal, a tradition that, in the work of the poet Iswarchandra Gupta or dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra, was more critical of the colonial rule than its liberal counterpart. The general leftist reaction to the 'traditional' aspect of Ghatak's cinema was negative, contributing to his isolation from the most likely of his patrons in the radical period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For typical examples of such reaction see the essays by Iraban Basu Roy and Prabrit Das Mahapatra in Ritwik Ghatak O Tar Chhabi, Vol 2. The Assamese Marxist critic, Hiren Gohain, raised similar objections to Bagchi's essay cited above in Frontier. The Citizen's Journey and the Eternal Return Commenting on Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), Ritwik Ghatak wrote that the film's ending suffers from a major misconception. (1) Ray's film ends with Apu walking away from the horizon, towards the camera, with Kajol on his shoulders, they are set on the path to the future. However, the novel (2) ends with Apu returning to his ancestral village with his son, Kajol. As the young boy stands before the ruins of their abandoned home the place itself and its lost inhabitants dead family members, local gods, characters from the local lore and from The Mahabharata begin to speak to him. They announce the return of Apu in the incarnation of the boy. The return to the bosom of the ancestral village at the end of Bibhuitbhushan's novel is poignant in its very refusal to follow the archetypal novelistic journey from the country to the city. It is a return of the village itself as a lost consciousness. Ray does away with this episode, and seems to offer an affirmative image of the trajectory of the citizen. (3) Ghatak's comment, made towards the end of his career, reveals more about his own art than about anything else. It tells us about his approach to questions of selfhood and narrative. Ghatak expressed deep admiration for the first two films of the trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956), but even with Pather Panchali, Apu's movement away from the village at the end bothered him, he found it lacking in depth, that the wanderer's generous melody was absent in that ending. The mythical power of return will fascinate Ghatak; he was not satisfied with a form that enacts the historical flow but sought to turn history itself into an object of investigation. That one important task seemed to be to give expression to the sense of violation brought on by the historical transportation of his people into the scene of the contemporary nation. He could not do this by positing a wholesome tradition and past, over and against modernity, a road taken by much of popular cinema since the 1970s, but he had to remain strangely solitary in his choices. Ray was to write of Ghatak, One doesn't notice any influence of other schools of filmmaking on his work. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all. The occasional echo of classical Soviet school is there, but this does not prevent him from being in a class by himself. (4) It was as much a matter of choice as of training, his cinema was 'intellectual' (5) in the sense that there was a conscious attempt to make cinema itself a tool in the search for what, rephrasing Bertolt Brecht's words, one can call a 'fighting conception of the modern'. Ghatak's solitude should be a challenge to the critic, not least because it cautions us against using his example as one of questioning modern modes from the side of tradition as is sometimes done. (6) Let us remember that his use of popular forms of narrative and performance did not win him any popular audience in his time. The City of Oblivion At the end of their night-long revelry in Subarnarekha (1962), the two renegades, Iswar and Haraprasad, take a taxi ride down the streets of Calcutta. Earlier, in the pub, verses from the Upanishad were chanted against the theme music of La Dolce Vita. The great spiritual delirium of the city continues to bring cultural quotes into a spectacular collage as the two drunken friends are swallowed up by the night. On the haze of streetlights passing across the screen we hear their voices:

Haven't seen the Atom Bomb Haven't. Haven't they? Never. Haven't seen the War, haven't seen the Famine, haven't seen the riots, haven't seen the Partition... Useless that old hymn to the glory of the Sun ... Iswar will turn up at his sister's quarter as her first customer soon after this. She will slash her own throat with a kitchen knife. Ghatak names his project with fearsome accent here: remembering not to forget. 7. See, for example 'Interview with Ghatak' in Ghatak: Arguments/ Stories, ed. Ashish Rajadhyakasha and Amrit Gangar (Bombay: Screen Unit) 1987, pp 88-89. 8. The Indian People's Theatre Association. Launched in 1943, it led a highly creative movement of politically engaged art and literature, bringing into its fold the foremost artists of the time. Ghatak and Mrinal Sen are among the direct products of the movement. 9. See his lyrical reminiscences in 'Chhabi Kora' in Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p35.

He recorded his debt to the socialist political-cultural project of the 1940s. (7) The 40s was the decade of the Bengal Famine, the partition of India, Hindu-Muslim riots, Independence. And it was also the decade of the Quit India movement, the naval mutiny, peasant rebellions, thousands of strikes, barricades on the street raised by workers, students and ordinary citizens, a decade of cultural resurgence led by the IPTA. (8) He would perceive the tragedy of the decade not so much as the failure of revolution but as oblivion for a people. He talked about the lost Bengal in a language close to the author of Pather Panchali, in terms of childhood, plenitude and home (9); but the excavation of memory in his films is not so much a matter of a return to roots as it is sometimes thought, it is meant to bring back the moment of rupture to consciousness, a moment that the traumatised do not know how to remember. It is possible to address the question of selfhood and form in his work in connection with the project of remembrance he undertakes, keeping in mind the essential challenge his films pose: they sound the recall, but on the other hand, they refuse to accept a chronology that demands submission to its logic of violence. To come to terms with history did not mean in Ghatak's work accepting it essentially as progress, or accepting the present as the only possible outcome of its processes. Which is perhaps why the outward journey from the country to the city, figured as destiny, celebrated as movement towards an envisaged future would make him uncomfortable. His work, in film or in writing, on the other hand, does not leave any scope to lapse back into a history versus myth argument; it proposes a much more difficult course: to lay bare the irrational substratum of the present, to make history face its other at its heart, and therefore, also break open the secret alliance of realism and melodrama. As he prised open that interlock the combination without which realism or melodrama hardly ever functions Ghatak had to alienate himself from the trend in more than one way. Let us remember that around the middle of the 1950s both realism (or art film) and melodrama (or popular film)

arrived at their classic formulations in Indian cinema. The new melodrama responded to the modernising impulse of the new nation more consistently. It celebrated the urban adventure, sought to figure the journey to citizenship by capturing the seduction of the city space; the new romance it formulated was in many ways a romance with modernity. There was a visible attempt to conceive the domain of the romantic couple in its autonomy from the familial domain a desire that often ended up giving rise to unstable tropes of space. In displacing historical tragedy into upheavals in kinship relations, Ghatak was following a well-worn logic of melodrama, but let us remember how in its bourgeois articulation, the contemporary melodrama was seeking a compromise between the shelter of the old family and community on one hand and the dream of individualism and industrial progress on the other. Close at hand was the example of Bengali melodrama that came to be known after its most successful star, Uttam Kumar. It developed a powerful form out of this compromise, and still remains the most potent articulation of the fantasy of the journey to the city for the Bengali middle class of the individual's emergence into the historical open without having to abjure the protection of the past. Ghatak's melodramatic turn was truly scandalous; he followed the logic of the form to its end so that, by stepping into the enclosure of primal bonds, the kernel of resistance to the individual's development, one could produce the most acute observations of historical processes.

10. The critical re-appraisal of Ghatak in the 1980s stressed his experiments with narrative. The first important treatment was by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritiwk Ghatak, A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982) (see especially, 'Chapter Three'). Some important essays are collected in Ghatak: Arguments/ Stories. The challenge of history is recognised in two ways. In the first, he tries to figure history as a horizon into which the narrative must open, and from which it draws its final coherence. The best example is probably E-Flat (Komal Gandhar, 1961), a film that does not hold together unless one uses historical memory to re-order it. Of the other process Subarnarekha tells us most clearly remembrance as not simply recognition of the past, but an excavation of what has passed under the cover of historical reality. The first process has been studied in some detail already (10); I would like to make a few points here on the second aspect of his melodramatic turn.

11. By the end of 1947, 16 million people had lost their homes, the number of refugees in West Bengal by 1951 was 3.5 million. A conservative official estimate put the number killed in riots by 1948 at 1 million, but the actual figure is thought to be much higher. Ghatak took one rupture in the history he witnessed as central the partition of Bengal. As he went on extending that event into a metaphor for everything that was alienating and destructive in the experience of his community, and talked about the pervasive degeneration of his country sometimes solely in terms of it, he faced puzzlement and even incomprehension from his contemporaries. Wasn't he being obsessed with a single event? Wasn't he living in the past, cutting himself off from the contemporary? The full irony of the situation is probably now coming to light: the Partition a joint treachery committed by the colonial power and the nationalist leadership cost millions of lives (mainly in Punjab and Bengal, but also in other provinces as the communal riots spread) and left millions homeless (11), but had hardly any thematic impact on film or literature. People forgot to talk about it. In the face of this silence the history model of narration itself had to be played with, it had to be crossed with elements borrowed from traditional community-centred forms epic, chronicle play, allegory, musical theatre. But in the face of historical denial Ghatak would also resort to a drama where a few hapless characters would say just that 'we deny it'. These are people who howl against the rocks that they want to live, who place negation against negation by closing the circle before violent interdictions of change. A particular kinship relation takes on an acute dimension in this drama. It works to defeat the melodrama of couple formation even as it destroys the logic of the other, pre-bourgeois melodrama: the feudal family romance.

12. Jagaddal means the immoveable.

13. Which is to say that it functions like what Lacan called the gaze, a look that belongs to no one. The First Films With the exception of Ajantrik (1958), the films from the 1950s and 60s show a compulsive engagement with the brother-sister relationship. The absence of the couple, however, connects Ajantrik also to the same preoccupation. Here the two-term, pre-social bond is between the hero Bimal and his jalopy, Jagaddal. (12) Bimal is an eccentric, a loner; the only conversation he can have is with the car and the young garage boy, Sultan. His fellow taxi-drivers make fun of him, 'Is the car a woman?' they ask. Perhaps it is, but what kind of woman? In a rare moment of eloquence, Bimal tells Sultan that in these days of hardship, the old car gets him his day's meal; it came into his life, he says, the year his mother passed away. Let us recall the sequences with the runaway bride. The moment she appears Bimal is seized by a strange and almost comic disturbance, which is matched by the reactions of the car (its gets murderously jealous, even tries to run over the woman). After the woman, cheated and abandoned by the man she had eloped with, leaves in the train, this play of identification the humanisation of the car, the humanism of the story disintegrates before our eyes. Bimal tries to catch her in the next station by taking a shortcut through the hills. The car breaks down on the way, gets reduced to the 'thing' as it were, it refuses to be human any more. Nature stands grandly aloof, watching. The very look of the camera breaks free of diegetic sources and begins to flow in from nowhere. (13)

As the hero steps into the domain of social sexuality, as the possibility of romantic couple formation is suggested, it is the realist order of the narrative that falls into crisis. Why should transition from the presocial to the social create a crisis for the realist logic? The answer might tell us about Ghatak's distance from not only familiar forms but also from the agreed upon equations between forms and feelings. When we move into the other kinship bond that forecloses couple formation the brother-sister bond rather than the bond with the mother the whole question becomes much more complex, generates formidable challenges. The conflict between maternality and conjugality is simpler after all Indian melodrama has been negotiating a resolution of that conflict for decades but none of us were prepared for the those brothers and sisters of Ghatak to appear as exemplars of the pure couple. Towards the end of Nagarik (1953), the unemployed hero Ramu receives the promise from his beloved Uma that she will join him in the slum his family is moving into. As she makes the promise, we see a closeup of the starving Uma: her face awash with soft light, strong backlight throwing a rim of silver dust on her hair. It reminds us of the close-up of Nita in The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) at the end

of the duet she sings with her brother. Uma's expression of solidarity inspires Ramu to urge their tenant, Sagar, to accept his sister Sita as his partner, to be a fellow traveller in their impending journey into the night. But the Ramu-Uma relationship is dealt with briefly, almost with reluctance in Nagarik, the real emotional bonding exists between Ramu and his sister Sita. Sita, wasting away at home as the unmarriageable daughter, can laugh and become playful only in the company of her elder brother, and Ramu finds in her the friend who knows him more than anyone else, believes in him despite his repeated failure to get a job. The parents appear at times to have become calloused by the daily privations, but tenderness is preserved in the domain of interaction between the two siblings. Theatrical use of the body at climactic points, which evolves into significant sculptural and dance-like postures in the three films of the 60s, appears in its cruder form in the film. But significantly, these gestures appear with the same intensity in the scenes between Ramu and his sister as in those between Ramu and Uma. They come at points of emotional saturation between Ramu and Sita, when the pain of one seems to pierce the other. Names are almost never without allegorical import in Ghatak's films; they are called Ram and Sita after the divine couple from the Ramayana. The tale of a village boy's adventure in Runaway (Bari Theke Paliye, 1959) places the mother as the princess, she is the woman for whom the boy seeks the treasure in the city. However, the sister one who is younger in age (the elder sister often figures as an extension of the mother in Indian families) appears as part of a proto-romance in the story. The runaway Kanchan meets the little Mini in the city, is very attracted to her, and dreams of taking her home to his mother. Mini's ailing mother treats Kanchan as a son, he finds a second home in Mini's house. The two children look like early incarnations of lovers, foreshadowing the young Abhiram and Sita in Subarnarekha. That film will also show that in a way it is consistent with the 'obsession' with the mother archetype in Ghatak's films that the brother and sister should form the primary basis of love. Against the Mandate of Separation: The three films of the '60s The overvaluation of this kinship bond in the films has gone unnoticed but it is insistent. Nita in The CloudCapped Star fails in her relationship with Sanat, but then the relationship is something in which she hardly participates with any enthusiasm, and it does not seem to occupy her much once Sanat's betrayal is confirmed. On the other hand, she and her elder brother Shankar create an island of happiness and belonging in the turbulent waters of the refugee home. It is the secret sharing of a language that their relationship thrives on. They exchange poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, indulge in childish play, together they devise means to tackle the daily humiliation of the artist and the dreamer. 14. Tagore song.

Sanat's marriage to Nita's sister brings on a climax. Shankar will decide to leave the house after this, Nita will begin to wither away. Before the wedding she asks Shankar to teach her a Rabindrasangit. (14) As they sing in duet ('The night the storm broke open my doors') Nita's body goes through an ecstatic choreography. We know it is not merely the lover's desertion that has caused this anguish, this mourning. The ecstasy joins the two figures of Shankar and Nita into a series of iconic compositions, bringing out into the open the iconic potential in the use of bodies that the film has built up. The song is thrown like a cry against the walls made of bamboo mats, moonlight trickles in as if in answer. In the climax the musical notes give way to sounds of lashing. Let us recall the mythical allusions in the

story. Nita was born on the day the goddess Jagaddhatri (Durga) is worshipped, the wailing choric voice in the soundtrack impersonates Durga's mother Menaka, calling her back to her bosom, to her parental home in the hills. She will set out on that journey, as if abandoning the shelter on earth where no one recognised her. Shankar is another name for Shiva, Durga's husband.

E-Flat is the only film in Ghatak's oeuvre where romantic love is central. The extended metaphor is that of marriage, the love triangle serves as an allegorical core elaborated into relationships between individuals, groups and places of dwelling. Ghatak captures his own autobiography as a radical theatre activist and playwright, weaves the story of his own marriage into the plot, talks about the Partition of 1947 directly for the first time, as something witnessed by his protagonists. This audacity was greeted with silence and slander. The film was booed out of the theatres, Ghatak's old colleagues turned against it. More than the obsession with Partition, at this point it was the articulation of personal experiences that alienated his audience. But that is the task that the film sets itself. A traditional marriage song sung by women works as the leitmotif; marriage and love become depersonalised through ritual enactment. In the tussle between the two rival theatre groups Anasuya, the heroine, works as a mediator; but her crossing over to Bhrigu's group is also an anthropological act of exchange between two sides, here put into effect by woman herself. The love story, thus refracted, connects with the theme of re-unification of the divided Bengal. Conjugality calls for separation from the original family and community; it is quite possible to think that E-Flat uses the motif of marriage, paradoxically, to suggest an overcoming of the imperative of separation. Not simply the joining of two hearts, here the theme of marriage suggests the healing of the sore of separation. To mourn the separation a new political drama is envisaged: Bhrigu (and Ghatak himself) goes back to Kalidasa's Abhijnan Shakuntalam to fashion the epic form he is searching for. The scenes from the play that we see centre around the heroine Shakuntala's departure for her husband's kingdom. At the end of the film Anasuya and Bhrigu stand close to the railway tracks joining hands in a gesture reminiscent of the wedding ritual. The motif of the railway track is introduced in a scene early in the film, through an inspired sequence of orchestrated spaces, actions and songs. During an outing, Bhrigu and Anasuya stand at the very end of the tracks in that scene; they look beyond the river Padma and reminisce about their lost homes on the other side. From what they say they seem to share the same family, the same home and childhood. On the second outing, in the Kurseong hills, Anasuya tells Jaya, her younger teammate, about her activist mother who was killed in the communal riots. Her mother had a rare fire in her eyes, she says, and she can see that light in Bhrigu's eyes. Later, on their third excursion in Bolpur, she will hand over her most precious possession, her mother's diary, to Bhrigu, and tell him, You are my mother's son, I knew it the moment I saw you.

15. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers, 'Violence and Responsibility' in Ghatak: Arguments/Stories, p 62. See also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak, A Return to the Epic, pp 104-110.

16. In by far the best commentary available on the film Ghatak tries to explain the 'melodramatic lapse' into coincidences in the film by drawing attention to the role played by coincidence in his 'epic' form. The central event, the brother turning up as the sister's client, being a coincidence, everything else could be. But what kind of coincidence is it? (one) has to understand that whichever woman the brother visited would have been his sister, 'Subarnarekha Prasange' (1966), Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p 41.

Subarnarekha of course underlines the theme in some ways. Kumar Shahani has written that the film exposes a general pathology, the self-destructive incestuous drive of a class, which is mirrored here in the relationship between Iswar and Sita. (15) What is more interesting to note in the Iswar-Sita relationship, however, is not incestuous drive, but a substance within the kinship bond that is 'more than itself', which defies social naming, pre-exists known sexual elaborations including incest. Iswar has no woman in his life, as he tries to build a new home in the refugee colony he has to play the father's role to the little Sita, his sister. He leaves the colony ('deserts it', as Haraprasad says) to take up a job in the desolate Chatimpur, primarily thinking of her future. Abhiram, the orphan boy he has adopted, comes along. Sita will be his sole companion in Chatimpur after Abhiram is sent off to a boarding school. It is predictable that in the grown-up Sita Iswar would find the reflection of their dead mother. How do you look so like the mother you have never seen? he asks her. His love is not unmixed with jealousy. His distance with the adult Abhiram and his insane anger at the realisation of the latter's romantic involvement with Sita, or his 'madness' after her elopement with him are all explained by narrative motivation, but the pattern of reactions has another logic of a secret accumulation of affects. Iswar will go to the city on the invitation of Haraprasad, to drown himself in the 'grotesque fun' that Calcutta is, will end up at Sita's quarter as her first client, she will be destroyed once they are reunited thus. The use of coincidence disturbed his viewers, but Ghatak did not think it was much of a coincidence, so far as he was concerned whichever woman he visited would have been his sister. (16)

As the director keeps playing with his favourite low-angle shots the impending destruction comes to be signalled through the image. Iswar draws Sita close to him, asks her how she could exactly be like the mother she has never seen. Sita leans forward, caresses his forehead and whispers in his ear that she is his mother. We see the two of them in an extreme low-angle shot that takes in part of the fan whirling on the ceiling. The strain on the limits of the frame begins to point to the breaching of the borders of named relations. Later, after Sita's desertion, the frame will be repeated: Iswar would try to hang himself from the hook where the fan was hanging in the earlier scene. Sita marries the low-born Abhiram. His mother, we are briefly told, is called Kaushalya after the hero's mother in Ramayana. The untouchable refugee Ram and Sita grow up like siblings. When they run into the abandoned airstrip their playful figures momentarily but strongly recall Apu and Durga running into the fields in Pather Panchali. They do not seem to have any other playmates save each other in this remote and profoundly quiet country. As soon as the grown-up Abhiram comes back from the town, the film offers us their love as a simple fact, as if nothing else could have been the case. If the film strives to reveal the selfdestructive drives of a threatened community then it does so in keeping with the general value that Ghatak places on such bonding in his films, its nurturing potential is also underlined. Sita, Abhiram and Iswar spend extended days of childhood at an idyllic remove from the turbulent city. Sita loses her brothers when the man-woman relationship is invoked in the space of the city which embodies the historical present. Tales and History Ghatak's own essays are among the best commentaries available on the films, but he shares the silence of his commentators on this particular theme. He did feel the need to invoke psychoanalytic categories to explain some of his persistent motifs, but it was Jungian theory that engaged his attention. He needed conceptual tools that would compensate for the lack of attention to questions of subjectivity and tradition in contemporary Marxist thinking, and Jung helped him think of these questions in relation to the collective experience. Given the intellectual atmosphere he belonged to, Freud would have meant too much of a retreat into the individual. One would, however, like to know how Ghatak, with his keen anthropological interests, would have responded to the critical possibilities of rethinking the family complexes beyond individual destinies or universalist claims, as insights into the social formation of subjects, as allegories of passage into the realm of social exchange.

17. Ramanujan, 'The Indian Oedipus' in Oedipus, A Folklore Casebook, ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) pp 238-261. These brothers and sisters form a two-term relation that seems to resist the Oedipal passage, and thereby also the normative historical development of the individual. The objection to the universalist claims of the Oedipus complex has often come from anthropologists; the question, however, is not to find some variant of the Oedipal structure in Indian society or in the films in question, but to see if the Oedipal metaphor can help one understand the dynamics of resistance involved here. In a memorable essay, the poet and critic A.K. Ramanujan showed how the Oedipus tale is part of the folklore repertoire in India but is almost always told from the point of view of the mother. Desire is directed from her side towards the son, and most often mothers narrate the story to the daughter. (17) Poetic articulations of the tale show how the gap between laws of desire and laws of the family evolve into creative consciousness in a culture. In one such tale, the woman discovers she has married her son after she gives birth to a son by him; before she hangs herself by its swaddling clothes she puts the baby to sleep singing a lullaby:

Sleep O son O grandson O brother to my husband Sleep O sleep Sleep well.

18. Sophocles's play shows how from Jocasta's perspective the tale is pre- or non-Oedipal, she knows there is hardly any man who has not desired his mother. One could imagine Sita remembering such a song before her death. The Indian tales Ramanujan lists are surprisingly close to the Greek myth, but the very fact that most of them are mothers' stories, told by the woman, disturbs the whole Freudian theme of growth through the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The tale becomes pre-Oedipal once ordered from this perspective, in the sense that it tells of resistance to the insertion of the third term into the two-term bond that brings on the moment of the complex. (18) How to find stories that would resonate with narratives already embedded in a social life? One could try to make sense of the tragic overvaluation of blood ties with such artistic problems in mind. As a storyteller Ghatak invests the relation with his own value and meaning, which gains resonance through the existing anthropological possibilities of ordering that relation. 19. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, '457', trans. A.V. Miller, Analysis and Foreword by J.N. Findlay

(Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 1998) pp 274-275. 20. I would not have done the forbidden thing For any husband or for any son. For why? I could have had another husband And by him other sons, if one were lost; But, father and mother lost, where would I get Another brother? Sophocles, Antigone, The Theban Plays, trans. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1947) p 150. As someone deeply interested in myths, Ghatak might have remembered the story of Oedipus's daughter, Antigone. This story provides the most well known example of the brother-sister relation posing resistance to the mandate of becoming a citizen. Hegel offered a famous formulation of the conflict between two laws that arises as Antigone takes the decision of breaking the law of the city to give her brother a burial. About the relationship itself he wrote that it is one free of transience or inequality. The sister is intuitively close to the highest form of ethical life, because as a daughter the woman must accept resignedly the passing away of her parents; as mother and wife she is contingent someone else could have taken her place and is bound by desire; in the unequal relation to her husband, moreover, she cannot 'recognise' herself in another; but in the brother her 'recognition of herself is pure', the loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister. (19) These are Antigone's words from Sophocles. (20) 21. Jacques Derrida has suggested this in his Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr,. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). It has been pointed out that Antigone not only opposes the law of the family to the law of the city, but by such overvaluation of one bonding over others she ends up violating the very economy of family relations. (21) The allegory of the law and the state is relevant to our discussion to the extent that it illuminates the content of a resistance to the imperative of growth, to the official narrative of development in Ghatak's cinema. His contemporary Indian cinema was trying to negotiate the making of the modern Indian citizen. Ghatak's response to this obsession was to speak of the mourning that must underlie the celebration. Like Antigone, the logic of love in his films designates a space outside both family and state by positing an excess in the economy, by predating the necessary social partition of the two-term bond. The project of historical remembrance thus takes recourse in his cinema to a 'denial' of the historical separation. For a historian this would be a dangerous thing to do, close as it is to reactionary attitudes all too familiar to us, but for the artist here was a chance to extend a popular mode to the limit of genuine articulation. The melodramatic tendency of displacing the social into the domain of kinship and family is pushed beyond the limit of its triangular allegories of subject formation. The brother and sister in their love withdraw from the Symbolic, from the domain where names are fixed and destinies are already narrated. This withdrawal is meant as protest against chronicles of becoming foretold, against the genocidal victories of history.

22. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution, Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis ( London: Virago, 1984) pp 287-294. Withdrawal from the Symbolic, from the realm of social meanings, produces silence and

primal cries, inexplicable pain. How else can one explain the body in ecstasy in The Cloud-Capped Star, or the voice travelling through the hills beyond the limits of the familiar world? Women like Nita seem to refuse to go through the passage that would put them in contact with the outside, the adult world, because it has come as a violation of the landscape as home. The fascination with 'return' ends up in the symbolic form of a child's game here. The withdrawal can become a retrograde stand, but it is also a necessary gesture of radical negation. One of the most memorable instances of a romantic relationship subsumed into the brother and sister bonding is found in the protagonists of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff. Juliet Mitchell likened the retreat from the Symbolic or the social order in that novel (Catherine finally says to Nelly, Heathcliff is me) to the discourse of the hysteric. That discourse is essential for the woman's voice to function, because there is no going back, the only way to speak is from within the regime of discourses created by capitalist patriarchy. Mitchell found an essential trait of the bourgeois novel itself in this discourse; it can produce the Mills and Boon romance, but it can also produce the truth of a Wuthering Heights. (22)

Ghatak never made the political films a sworn Marxist like him would be expected to make. His politics becomes emotionally so rich because, alongside the bold picturing of everyday struggles, he repeatedly captures the necessary but tragic denial by individuals to tread into the full light of the day. Nita, Anasuya or Sita are fully engaged individuals in relation to labour, daily hardships and challenges of survival, but they also seem to be unspeakably tender, almost luminous beings. The choric grocer in The Cloud-Capped Star says of Nita, The tender girl ... how can she bear such hardship? Partly unprepared to deal with the cruelty of the world, they cling to the one who is part of their own selves. The fullness of being is gathered into this fold, the implacable sense of pain in Ghatak's cinema seems to stem from this hidden enclosure. Such passion is not simply endorsed or negated (in fact Nita, Sita and Iswar stand accused to some extent in the films), but is presented as material for the tragic form that neither melodrama nor realism of the day was adequate to. The formal deviations from realism that caused such misgivings about Ghatak's cinema function not in opposition to the modern mode, which the filmmaker embraced, but as a critique from inside it, pointing to the cost at which such modes are assimilated into our lives.