There was a bad boy in school—disobedient and moody. Some teachers didn’t like him. The word spread, and soon, he was ignored by almost everyone. Expelled from the school, he struggled to survive an othered existence and finally stumbled to an early death. And then… people discovered the talent that he really was.
If this story reads like a blurb of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s life, it is. But did all those who had billed him enfant terrible know about the pain of his land getting torn apart that he tried capturing with his art? And why the sudden outpouring of awe for him from the hour of his passing in early 1976—and its continued torrent in the global cinema community for the next 50 years? This is what Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, edited by Shamya Dasgupta, tries to excavate. It is an up-close view of the man and his works as told by many who had been close enough to observe the trauma in his eyes and smell the alcohol in his breath.
The book is neatly divided into different sections. A Bio-sketch in Seven Parts streetlights the lonely walk of his personal life with anecdotes and revelations from nieces Mahasweta Devi and Aroma Dutta, twin sister Pratiti Devi, and former colleagues Kumar Roy, among others. Ghatak had an unhappy life; hardly a sentence by the contributors speaks of Ghatak having ever been in a happy state over a span of 40 years.
From getting chloroformed and thrown into water in his childhood to having to borrow a few paise to buy country liquor, to being refused entry into his home by his wife, to being confined in a mental hospital, his continual pain and suffering jump out of every page. The rare alcove he felt snug in seemed to be by the side of his twin sister, Pratiti. Little wonder that brother-sister bonding figured in quite a few of his films. Pratiti recollects: “We went to Kumilla. At night, we were lying down next to each other and thinking of what to do. Then it struck me. I could give him Titas Ekti Nadir Naam to read. He started reading it immediately, and around midnight, he suddenly exclaimed, ‘The idea! This is the book I will make. Give me a pen and some paper immediately.’ It was late at night. The shops, the few that still existed, were shut.”
In the next section, we get to see the filmmaker, and by extension, the collaborator he was. It features conversations with ten individuals from diverse functions in filmmaking who had worked with him for over twenty years. They recount interesting experiences like why producer Pramod Lahiri went ahead and bankrolled Bari Theke Paliye despite the failure of Ajantrik, what improvisations cameraman Dinen Gupta and Ghatak made in the lighting while shooting the Tagore song in Meghe Dhaka Tara. The functional diversity of the contributors and a minimal overlap between the films referenced by them provide a spherical view of Ghatak’s world and work. Their unanimity in endorsing Ghatak as a master of his game is balanced out by candid observations about his unreasonable demands of the camera, his excesses with the bottle, swear words or even with his fiery passion that wasn’t quite counter-balanced by his sense of logic and proportion.
Those mentored or taught by him, like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani or those like Arun Khopkar, Goutam Ghose, and Jahnu Barua who were inspired by him, pay their tributes in one section. Expectedly, they talk sympathetically about how Ghatak’s heart bled at the partition of his Bengal, his world-weariness, his pain at Nagarik never being released and Komal Gandhar being taken off the theatres. They also debunk urban myths like Ghatak ever coming to teach a class at Film Institute Pune in an inebriated state or the much-spoken ‘rivalry’ between Satyajit Ray and Ghatak. They are also candid—for example, Ketan Mehta asserts that Ghatak was ‘too much of a maverick to be successful’. And they unequivocally express happiness that their guru’s films won great critical acclaim the world over after his lifetime. Each contributor has evidently invested time in what reads like a white bouquet of mini scripts on Ghatak, though one wishes they had been less technical in their analyses.
What slows the book down is the section Reading Ritwik, Writing Ritwik, featuring academic articles on Ghatak’s cinema. Page after page, one is bogged down by scholarly language, esoteric analyses and references that make little sense. Beat this by Devdutt Trivedi: “Ghatak’s cuts deterritorialise the existence of headspace.” Midway through his chapter, he appeared to have forgotten what he was writing about, so engrossed was he in parading his erudition and knowledge. One can skip through this section without missing much.
Ritwik, by Ritwik contains interviews with Ghatak dating as far back as the 1960s, offering first-hand views on humanist filmmaking and his plans of making a film on Vietnam. Here is an extract with his hard-hitting views. “The Bengali novel is, in my opinion, in a moribund condition today. From among the thousands of books that have been published in the last twenty years, I cannot remember more than five or six that are worth mentioning. The rest have been written quite obviously with filming in view. They are notably conspicuous for their crassness and lack of sincerity.”