Ghatak

Since his death at age fifty in 1976, Ritwik Ghatak has come to be regarded as one of the greatest figures in
postwar Indian cinema for his brilliant and abrasive films, which certainly rank among the most
revolutionary achievements in contemporary Indian art. Involved from an early age in politics and in
theater, Ghatak was a member of the Indian Communist Party and regarded Brecht and Eisenstein as his
artistic heroes. Consequently, Ghatak's films wed his activism with rich cultural content, fashioning popular
forms melodrama, songs, dances into appropriate vehicles for radical political expression. His films are
almost all veiled autobiography. Ghatak came of age during the convulsions of the 1940s World War II,
the terrible "man-made famine" of 1944, the communal violence that came with independence, and
especially the partition of Bengal, which obsessed him all his life. His subjects are almost invariably chosen
from among the uprooted and the dispossessed: parentless children, homeless families, disoriented
refugees, and the petit bourgeoisie, economically broken by their exile. Yet, as in the fatal vision of Robert
Bresson, there is a glimmer of hope in even the darkest moments.
A brilliant eccentric and heavy drinker, Ghatak completed only eight features before his premature death.
The HFA offers Ghataks last five as proof of his genius, films which include three heartbreaking
melodramas built around the partitioning of Bengal to form Pakistan out of what had been northeastern
India. These films The Cloud-Capped Star, The Golden Line and E-Flat are together sometimes referred
to as Ghataks partition trilogy.
(Meghey Dhaka Tara)

Directed by Ritwik Ghatak.
With Supriya Chowdhury, Anil Chatterjee, Bijan Bhattacharya
India 1960, 35mm, b/w, 126 min.
Bengali with English subtitles
Considered Ghatak's masterpiece, this powerful and innovative melodrama revolves around a refugee
family from East Bengal, victims of the Partition, who forge a precarious existence on the outskirts of
Calcutta. Ghatak captures the complex play of creative and destructive forces at work in the attempt of
each family member to survive. At the center of this domestic tragedy is the selfsacrificing Neeta, the
family's eldest daughter and provider for all, who struggles away at her job in the city. Closer to home, an
elder brother practices to become a singer, while a younger one turns to factory work. Gradually, the
father realizes the utter worthlessness of his liberal education in a modern world that has no place for
Yeats or Milton and no regard for the ideals of nineteenth-century Bengali liberalism.
(Jukti Takko Ar Gappo)

With Ritwik Ghatak, Tripti Mitra, Ritaban Ghatak
India 1974, 35mm, b/w, 120 min.
In his last film, Ghatak confronts his own life directly, casting himself as Nilkantha, an alcoholic and
frustrated intellectual; his son Ritaban plays his character's son. Against the backdrop of the 1971 war
between India and Pakistan, Nilkantha hits the road, setting out from Calcutta once his marriage
disintegrates. As his traveling group grows in size en route, Nilkantha reflects on his happy past, worries
over the state of India and muses on what the future holds.

(Komal Ghandhar)

With Supriya Chowdhury, Abanish Banerjee, Geeta Dey
India 1961, 35mm, b/w, 133 min.
This tale of two rival theater groups struggling to collaborate is at once a backstage drama and an allegory
about the partitioning of Bengal. The dictatorial stance of the director Bhrigu led to some of his troupe
splitting off to go their own way. Now young actress Anasuya tries to reunite the two groups for a
production of the classic play Shakuntala. As Anasuya and Bhrigu draw closer, their personal and
professional relations are complicated by the jealousy of Shanta, Bhrigu's former actress.

(Subarnarekha)

With Abhi Bhattacharya, Madhabi Mukherjee, Satindra Bhattacharya
India 1962, 35mm, b/w, 139 min.
Like The Cloud-Capped Star, The Golden Line is set in a refugee
neighborhood on the outskirts of Calcutta. The film opens in the early 1950s, with young Ishwar and his
little sister Seeta taking in an abandoned boy, Abhiram. Years later, Seeta and Abhiram fall in love, but the
sudden reappearance of Abhiram's mother confirms Abhiram's lower-caste status. Ishwar's determination
to find a high-caste husband for his sister sets the stage for tragedy.

A River Called Titash (Titas Ekti Nadir Naam)

With Rosa Samad, Roushan Jamil, M.A. Khair
India 1973, 35mm, b/w, 159 min..
Based on a celebrated Bengali novel, this film is a spare and beautiful portrait of the life and ultimate
dissolution of a fishing community on the banks of the river Titash in East Bengal during the 1930s.
Interspersed within its lyrical recording of the rhythms and rituals of the community is the tale of a couple
separated by a kidnapping. The wife escapes her captors and finds shelter with the fisherfolk while her
husband goes mad with grief. For Ghatak, whose childhood and early youth were spent in East Bengal, the
film confirms the inevitability of change and the terrible cyclical power of loss and resurrection.
------------------------------------
Jinxed legacy

PARTHA CHATTERJEE
Ritwik Ghataks films, among the best in cinema history, need a saviour to reclaim them so as to preserve
their enduring value.
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Ritwik Ghatak. He expressed highly complex ideas with ease.
AS a film-maker, Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) has passed into legend. But the threat of oblivion looms over a
large part of his legacy. His eight feature films and a clutch of documentaries lie in utter neglect in the tiny
government-allotted flat that houses the Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Trust in the congested Chetla market in
Kolkata.

The Ghatak family of Surama, 78, widow of the master, and son, Ritaban, nearing 44, are permanent
residents, while daughters Samhita and Suchismita are frequent visitors along with their children. The flat
resembles a ships cabin la the Marx brothers. Cans of film lie on the veranda completely at the mercy of
the elements. Kolkata, it must be remembered, has a trying monsoon every year.

In contrast, the legacy of Ghataks great contemporary Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is assured of survival. Most
of his films have been conserved, thanks to the vigorous efforts of Ray aficionado Dilip Basu, an academic
based in Santa Cruz, California. He has lobbied various well-heeled individuals and institutions for funds to
preserve the negatives and soundtracks of many of Rays films, along with other paraphernalia associated
with the artist. Besides, the Satyajit Ray Society in Kolkata also works to perpetuate his memory. Ritwik
Ghatak has had no such luck.

There is a body to look after Ghataks oeuvre. The Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Trust, formed not many years
after his death and soon after Ritaban came of age, was vibrant and active from the late 1980s for a
decade. Efforts were made to buy back the rights of Komal Gandhar (1961) and Meghe Dhaka Tara (1959),
two of his finest and, in a sense, emblematic films, from a Kolkata film distributor, Mansatta, who had
bought them from an indigent, alcoholic Ghatak in dire need of funds. Pressure was brought to bear on the
distributor who was sitting on the two masterpieces. He had paid only a few hundred rupees each for the
distribution rights.

Pramod Lahiri, aristocrat, bon vivant, reluctant businessman his family owned manganese mines in Chiri
Miri, Bihar and a childhood friend of Ghataks, financed two films: the superb Aajantrik (1957), which
bombed at the box office, and Bari Theke Paliye (1958), a (not quite) childrens film that had its moments.
Since neither of the productions made any money, Lahiri, with a heavy heart, had to stop backing his
friend.

Ghataks career post-Subarnarekha (completed in 1962, released in 1965) was a continuous trial. The war
of liberation in East Pakistan, which led to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, provided the director with
the opportunity to direct and complete Titash Ekti Nadir Naam between 1972 and 1974 despite a near-
fatal attack of phthisis. The producer of the film, Habibur Rehman Khan, lost his enthusiasm for the project,
probably because of the delay in its completion and hence release. Its reception at the box office in
Bangladesh and later on in Kolkata was tepid. Ghataks last film, Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo (it took four years
to complete from 1971), was released in 1977, after his death.

After Ritaban teamed up with Aruna Vasudev, founder-editor of Cinemaya and currently chairperson of
Ossian, two fresh prints were struck from the restored negatives of Titash. The results, to put it mildly,
were mixed. Apart from two reels that looked luminous, the rest of the footage looked decidedly muddier
than what was in the 1975 print, which this writer saw in the company of the director during a
retrospective of his films organised by Sanjib babu Chatterjee and his friends at Sapru House, New Delhi.
The prints of Nagarik, his first film, made in 1952, had not been discovered then.

The dupe negative of Titash was made with a German grant in a German laboratory. Why was such a
technically mediocre print produced? Was it because the original, or mother negative of the film, had
decayed in Bangladesh? Ritaban, who went to Dhaka in 1989 to search for the mother negative, discovered
to his astonishment that seven reels were missing and so a dupe negative was prepared from a master
positive struck from a print re-edited by the master in 1974.

Ghataks legacy seems to be jinxed like no one elses. Whenever he was asked about Nagarik, about which
Ray had very nice things to say, he came up with the same answer: The negative was a nitrate-based type.
It has lain untouched so long in the lab that it must be damaged beyond repair by now.

Rediscovery of Nagarik
The rediscovery of this film makes for an interesting story. In the summer of 1976, about six months after
Ghataks death, this writer, on a hunch, went to see Mahendra Gupt, co-producer of Meghe Dhaka Tara
and Komal Gandhar and producer of Trishna (based on Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte) and Shilpi,
both directed by Asit Sen, at his office on Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi. Mahendra Gupt was then running a
company called Motor and General Finance. That morning, in the presence of former banker and cultural
historian Akhilesh Mittal, he threw a teaser in response to the question, Where can one find the footage
and soundtrack of Nagarik?

Why dont you try Mr. Khemka at the Bengal Lab in Tollygunge? he suggested.

PICTURES: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

One swung into action, wrote to Mriganka Shekhar Ray, indefatigable Film Society man and a genuine film-
lover. His friend Mohammad Jamir, an ardent admirer of Ghataks work, paid in cash to clear the arrears of
the deceased with the laboratory and rescued the film 24 years after its making.

But Ghataks words proved prophetic. The search for Nagarik had begun too late. Most of the nitrate-
based negative had either turned to water in the cans or become so sticky that it would not come unstuck
without irreparably damaging the emulsion. The same was true of the sound negative.

The thing was indeed damaged beyond repair. A dupe negative was made from a damaged print, from
which was struck a fresh print. But this made it valuable only to archivists and scholars, not commercial
distributors. Thus, a pioneering film was only rescued in a damaged form for posterity. Its merit could only
be gauged by the most dedicated of cineastes.

But even in its mutilated form, there are elements in Nagarik to substantiate Rays positive claims on its
behalf. One could still feel the surge of emotion after a (very) private screening at the cavernous New
Empire cinema in Chowringhee, Kolkata, attended by four people, Mahendra Kumar, Ghataks talented
protg; Surama, his widow; his older daughter, Samhita; and this writer. It was clear even then that what
was in hand, though of considerable merit, would not pass muster at a commercial screening. Thus,
Ghataks earliest work is a casualty of sheer neglect.

Preserving films is an expensive business. It is a specialised job. Ironically, it costs a lot more to restore old
black-and-white (B/W) films because few laboratories anywhere in the world are equipped for the job.
Getting raw material film stock and chemicals is always difficult; precious little is manufactured for
production or archival purposes.

Twenty-five years ago, the Metro Kalver Corporation of America came out with an expensive process to
restore old B/W footage. Its main strength lies in filling up scratches and pinholes in the damaged
material, presumably matching the tonal quality of the original as closely as possible.

Ghataks films are among the best in the history of cinema. At least five of his eight films can be classified
as being of enduring value. Aajantrik, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, Subarnarekha and Titash will
stand the test of time, God and technology willing. There are many interesting moments in Nagarik, Bari
Theke Paliye and Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo, the last a scarcely concealed autobiography.

Among his shorts and documentaries, Rendezvous (ghost-directed for Rajendra Nath Shukla; it was his
diploma film at the Film and Television Institute, Pune, where Ghatak was vice-principal in 1965); Chhau
Dance of Purulia; Oraon, a preparatory work for Aajantrik, shot in 1955 in Chhota Nagpur, Bihar; and Bihar
Ke Kucch Darshaniya Sthaan deserve to be seen frequently.

The task of assessing Ghataks contribution to cinema is at once simple and complex. He did, at his best,
have the ability to express highly complex, even existential ideas with ease purely through cinematic
means. His best films are strewn with such moments. The scene in Aajantrik of the restored 1926 jalopy
going uphill and then suddenly coming back at the camera is one. It is followed by a scene of the same car
with a lovely Adivasi woman in it being pushed over a bridge while a train comes rushing out from under.

There are those prophetic scenes in Subarnarekha of the children Abhi and Rekha playing on a deserted
airstrip pretending they are flying when suddenly, seamlessly, the point of view changes to that of an
aircraft taking off, as seen from the pilots cabin. There is also the scene of little Sita walking across the
lonely airstrip when she suddenly runs into a bahuroopi dressed as Mahakaal, the scourge of time, and is
frightened.

Ghataks contribution, in short, was to bring cinema as close to music as possible in expressing the
inexpressible.

The preservation of our cinematic heritage cannot be left solely to the government. The National Film
Archives of India (NFAI), a state institution, has done great service in preserving the cinematic heritage of
India. But it is cash strapped. Grants from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry are simply not
enough for the NFAI to function effectively. Other corporate institutions and corporate bodies have to
come forward with money and material if the impossible is to become possible.

The current mantra is digitisation. One can work miracles, apparently, to preserve image and sound
through the video-audio process. But the high-end equipment essential for the preservation of films is
extremely expensive. In any case, before even thinking of digitisation, one must have a high-quality
negative and/or positive images and soundtrack, or separate images in negative and sound in optical
negative or magnetic modes.

This is not a one-time cost. Funds for conservation must be available year after year. Given the dire paucity
of money for the preservation and encouragement of even the so-called high arts such as music and dance,
what chance does cinema, considered an ubiquitous, plebeian form of entertainment, stand?

Ghatak belongs right up there with the greats, such as John Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alain
Resnais, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi and others. Unlike them, however, his
films are in constant danger of attrition and oblivion by time, weather, neglect and the attentions of the
wrong sort of people.

Being the darling of the film studies set is a decidedly mixed blessing. For one thing, it is unlikely to serve
his memory or his work in any constructive way. Being seen on video by minuscule groups of people with
their own agendas is no substitute for public viewing on as wide a scale as possible.

Despite several retrospectives in the last 25 years, including a hugely successful one in New York in 1996,
Ghatak remains a fringe figure. It is long past the time when his work became accessible to a large,
international audience. Given the dire condition of his work, only a well-organised set-up such as, for
instance, the Criterion Collection could make this possible, by treating its investment as a viable business
proposition. It must be remembered that Criterion brought to connoisseurs the world over a wide variety
of memorable films on DVD. Ghataks films, in order to exist in a worthy state for future generations, need
such a saviour.
------------------------------
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
any-space-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.
------------------------------
Today his films enjoy much critical acclaim but in their time they ran to mainly empty houses in Bengal.
Ghatak's films project a unique sensibility. They are often brilliant, but almost always flawed.

By and large Ghatak's films revolve around two central themes: the experience of being uprooted from the
idyllic rural milieu of East Bengal and the cultural trauma of the partition of 1947.
Ghatak's first film was Nagrik (1952) about a young man's search for a job and the erosion of his optimism
and idealism as his family sinks into abject poverty. The film was ultimately to be released in the late
seventies.
He did wrote the scripts of Musafir (1957) and Madhumati (1958) for Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy
respectively, the latter became an all time evergreen hit.
Ajantrik in 1957 - Ajantrik's story revolves around a small time Bihari taxi-driver's unusual relationship with
his battered Chevrolet. Said Ritwik about the film: "You can call my protagonist, Bimal, a lunatic, a child, or
a tribal. At one level they are all the same. They react to lifeless things almost passionately. This is an
ancient, archetypal reaction....The tribal songs and dances in Ajantrik describe the whole cycle of life -
birth, hunting, marriage, death, ancestor worship, and rebirth. This is the main theme of Ajantrik, this law
of life."
Bari thheke paliye was made in 1959, is based on a children's story about a little boy who runs away from
home in search of adventure.
The beginning of 1960's saw the full development of his style of film-making with three of his most well-
known films - Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komol Gandhar, and Subarnarekha.Meghe Dhaka Tara tells the story of
Nita, a woman who sacrifices her life to rebuild her family shattered by the effects of Partition and
subsequent exodus. Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) was the first film in a trilogy examining the socio-economic
implications of partition.
In Komol Gandhar Ritwik experimented more with the medium and tried to do away with storytelling.
`Komol Gandhar brought with it an overwhelming nostalgia for the IPTA days. The film failed to attract any
viewers and it shattered Ritwik.
Along with the failure of Komol Gandhar came the failure of Subarnarekha. One of the most complex films
of Ritwik, it moves `beyond the immediate problems thrown up by the partition of Bengal -
unemployment, urban distribution, collapsing family ties.
In 1971 Bangladesh was liberated from Pakistan after a bloody war and genocide in which more than a
million were killed. On an invitation to do a film on an epic novel based on the fishermen around the river
Titash, Ritwik went to Bangladesh to film Titas Ekti Nadir Naam. Perhaps no other film bears the stamp of
his whole approach to film-making more than this film.

He was to make one last film before his death. Jukti, Takko Aar Gaapo, based largely on himself and his
views was filmed in 1974.
Notable among his students at the Film and Television Training Institute in Pune are Kumar Shahani, Mani
Kaul, Sayeed Mirza and Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
-------------------------------
2004, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
No. 47

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 1930s-50s,
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 epic-
minded 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 post-
Independence 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.

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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. 201-
205, 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.


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.


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. 127-131; 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.


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. 3-10.
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Ghatak

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Ghatak

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Since his death at age fifty in 1976, Ritwik Ghatak has come to be regarded as one of the greatest figures in

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