Ritwik Ghatak Takes to Films

by Subrata Sinha

Sudhindranath Datta, one of the avant-garde post-Tagore modernist thinkers and poets of his time, penned his experience of watching a movie in his 1928 poem called ‘At a Cinema’ with these words:

“Upon the white backdrop

Passes the two-dimensional imitation of life.

The futile shadow of the shadow, the memory of a fleeting moment

Mimics reality.…

Classical harmony, truth are driven into far-off exile

from those world-changing images. A string of flippant whims

Roams screaming unfettered in the chaotic field

In a plebian vaunt.”

The tides of time took the mainstream Bengali intelligentsia a long way from those sentiments within the next twenty-five years. Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) was formed in London in 1935, with the spirit of bringing a gush of fresh blood within the Indian literary scenario, as recalled by the founders Sajjad Zahir and Mulk Raj Anand. In 1943 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) took its birth to ‘foster the development of the Theatre, music, dancing and other fine arts and literature in India, as an authentic expression of the social realities of our epoch…’. It was as a part of this aspiration for a realist authenticity in the performative arts Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (4 November1925–6 February 1976) started his journey as a Communist activist on the cultural front. His early career evolved around the stage, as a playwright, actor, and director, apart from a few short stories published occasionally. Between 1943 and 1953 Ghatak would take part in several productions of Tagore’s plays (Acalayatan, Dakghar, Natir Puja), an association he would later celebrate by admitting, ‘I cannot speak without him’; some of Brecht’s plays in translation like Kharir Gandi  (The Caucasian Chalk Circle) and Galileo carit; some of his own plays (Kalo Sayar, Dalil, Ispat, Jwalanta, and Jwala); and a few plays by Bijan Bhattacharya (Kalanka, Nabanna), with whom he would forge a friendship for life.

         It is difficult to say with any certainty when members IPTA started foraying into cinema, however, its debut feature Dharti ke Laal directed by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was released in 1946: Bijan Bhattacharya contributed to the screenplay, while Sambhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra acted in the film. This was consequential for the progressive cultural movements in India, and particularly in Bengal: West Bengal after independence. Bengal already had a history of prominent personalities from the progressive literary circles venturing into films, Kazi Nazrul Islam started acting in films in the mid-1930s; Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay and Premendra Mitra of the Kallol era joined the field of cinema in the early 1940s. However, IPTA producing films under its own banner had a profound impact on Indian Cinema. Many members of the IPTA also joined films through other independent production houses like R. K. Films of Raj Kapoor and Navketan Productions of Dev Anand and Chetan Anand. But such a relationship between the progressive theatre and cinema was particularly significant in Bengali film industry.

         Many of the IPTA members would start associating with films around the late 1940s in various capacities. Sambhu Mitra would act in a few films afterwards, with a rare directorial venture in Jagte Raho / Ek Din Ratre (1956); Bijan Bhattacharya would write scripts and act in films from 1946; Utpal Dutt would begin his career in films in 1950 with Michael Madhusudan and eventually act in more than two hundred films and direct a handful. One can argue that an increasing presence of the progressive forces from the literary and cultural circles of Bengal, like the members of the Kallol group or the IPTA, forced a decisive turn in the realm of films, where the cinema was no longer a ‘mere shadow of the shadow mimicking reality’ but a bold and emphatic form representative of the realities of life. One may recall Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950), bringing in a fresh air of social realism in Bengali films, which was praised by Pudovkin in Pravda. From this historic and evolving cultural milieu Ritwik Ghatak, by then an eminent cultural activist in the IPTA, who was responsible for drafting the central doctrinal document of the Bengal chapter of the IPTA in 1951, entered the realm of films.

         Ghatak’s first directorial assignment came in the form of ‘Bedeni’, befittingly based on a short story by Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, where he replaced Nirmal De. The film, initially shot in 1951, could not be finished. His first completed film, Nagarik (The Citizen), shot and edited in 1952-53, could only hit the screens in 1977, twenty-five years after its making, by which time the director was no more. A quasi-romantic exposition of city life across the class and gender, the film chronicles two families uprooted from their rural dwellings as they try to cope with the incredibly difficult circumstances. At the very beginning of the film an invisible narrator communicates its quest for an ideal and an idealized citizen in the backdrop of a riverine settlement. In Rani Roy’s translation, ‘I recognize him, I have seen him before. Here stands the great city. Where the river flows quietly under an adamantine iron structure. And by its side rolls a saga of tears and smiles. Where work of yet another day has come to an end. And the sun has set yet one more time on the lives of lakhs of an exhausted workforce. The sky is hemmed in by a web of wires. have seen him under such skies... amidst high and low citizens.... That one citizen.’

         The making of the film, although portraying the romantic quest of a young citizen seeking redemption from the humiliations of daily life through a rebellious struggle refusing to be sucked in, shows elements of a modernist sensitivity that had not been encountered very often in Bengali films before that. During this period, while rehearsing on a play Nicher Mahal (based on Gorky’s Lower Depths), Ghatak would pen yet another theoretical document on party lines, viz. On the Cultural Front, voicing his discontents about prevalent understandings of cultural practices and submit it to the Communist Party of India in 1954. The document would not receive much response from the Party, and Ghatak’s membership with the same would not be renewed in 1955, marking a very definite juncture in Ghatak’s life. For the next three years, Ghatak would shoot three documentaries for the then state of Bihar, viz., Adivasion ka jeevansrot (1955), Bihar ke darsaniya sthan (1955), and Oraon (1957).

In the meantime, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Pancali (1955) has its world premiere at the New York Museum of Modern Art, decisively changing the backdrop of Indian films and their global reception. Ajantrik (The Unmechanical) first of Ghatak’s films to be released in theatres in 1957, moves in an altogether new direction as an excursion into pathetic fallacy with a ramshackle car as a central character sharing the aspirations, disappointments and anger of its driver-cum-mechanic who must earn his his daily bread with its help. Two years later Ghatak makes Bari Theke Paliye (1959), a children’s film based on a young adult’s adventures to the city and its discontents.

         Ghatak finds his thematic forte a little late, one may argue. The themes of partition and forced migration, for which he is best remembered, appears only in his third, or fourth, film Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-capped Star, 1960). But once he finds it, Ghatak develops it over a trilogy connected only by a thematic similarity. While Meghe Dhaka Tara narrates the perils of a struggling refugee family in the midst of a desperate economic crisis, Komal Gandhar (E-flat, 1961) would explore the existential possibilities of a redefined and shared homeland through cultural activism; and Subarnarekha (1962) questions the ethical consequences of forced displacement and sequestered survival with persisting petty bourgeois morality. His trilogy would chronicle the fractured search for habitation between the overbearing realities of resettlements in a new country that was itself in a formative state and the distant memories of a proximate homeland that would never become their own again.

         However, Ghatak encountered this homeland of his rooted sorrow once again in the context of the freedom movement of Bangladesh, both personally, as well as artistically. In 1971, in the wake of the birth of Bangladesh, Ghatak would make a documentary on the theme called Durbar-Gati Padma (1971), which reveals his commitment to the cause. Ghatak detested the repeated fate of forced migration for the people of the then East Pakistan, and went to great lengths towards fund-raising for those turned once more into destitutes and refugees. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, to celebrate the new-born nation, Ghatak directed his sixth feature film Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, 1973), based on a novel by Advaita Mallabarman, set among the marginalised Malo community in the Brahmanbaria region of the erstwhile state of Tippera. His last completed feature film Jukti Takko ar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Story, 1977) would be release in September 1977, along with hitherto unreleased Nagarik. Ghatak’s last film shows a definitive departure from his earlier diction and a continuation of his deep interest in the Jungian notion of the ‘Great Mother’ archetype.

         Apart from the feature films, Ghatak made a number of documentaries on Ustad Allauddin Khan (1963), Civil Defence (1965), ‘Scientists of Tomorrow’ (1967), ‘Chhau dance of Purulia’ (1970); and the short docu-feature commemorating Lenin’s birth centenary, Amar Lenin (My Lenin, 1970), which was banned in India at the time, but received awards and accolades in the USSR. Ghatak also made a few diploma films during his short teaching career at the Film and Television Institute at Pune in 1965-66, where he left an indelible mark on his students like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahni, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and John Abraham. Ghatak failed to complete, at least four full-length feature films (Bedeni, 1951; Kata Ajanare, 1959; Bagalar Bangadarsan, 1964; and Ranger Golam, 1968); and also a few documentaries. But even in their incompleteness, these perhaps remain as a testimony to the uncompromising spirit of a non-conforming creative intellectual.

Beyond the scope of his finished and unfinished cinematic projects that are much celebrated today, Ghat has also left behind a host of plays, short stories, essays, reportage, and interviews given to numerous journals and magazines. Only a select few are sometimes available today in circulation for the lay enthusiast. Under the luminous haze of Ghatak the filmmaker, Ghatak the auteur and the critic has been relatively obscured. His writings in this area, if preserved and made available to the public, might have drawn comparisons with the notebooks of Fellini, or the anthology of poems by Pasolini. Ghatak’s centenary is an opportune moment to retrace such materials and bring them back to the living dialogues of our own days.

         But it is also a good time to contemplate yet another thing. Ritwik Ghatak witnessed colonial oppression and devoted himself to fight it and to voice the concerns of the oppressed in an emergent nation-state and a highly volatile world order. He did not create art from the vantage point of a minaret, but witnessed and chronicled with great empathy the everyday lives of ordinary people with their destructive traumas and their miniscule triumphs. Half a century down the line, both the nation and the world seems to be spiralling into the abyss of divisive agenda, oppressive states, and totalitarian regimes. Ghatak may seem no less pertinent today than he was in his own time, if we are willing to give empathy a chance.

Sources:

Ritwik Ghatak, Partition Quartet I: Nagarik, Rani Roy tr., Ira Bhaskar ed., New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2021.

---, On the Cultural ‘Front’ (1954), Kolkata: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 2000.

---, Calaccitra Manush ebang Aro Kichu, Sanjay Mukhopadhyay ed., Kolkata: Dey’s 2005.

---, Cinema & I, Kolkata: Ritwik Memorial Trust & Dhyanbindu, 2015.

Marxist Cultural Movement in India – I, Sudhi Pradhan ed., Kolkata: Pustak Bipani, 1985.

Paul Willeman et. Al., Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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 The essay was originally published in Hum Dekhenge: All India Cultural Newsletter, Vol. XIV, September 2025. The author gratefully acknowledges Malini Bhattacharya for kindly editing an earlier draft.