Preserving vision of a cinematic maestro
In a world grown more chaotic, atomised, and close to breaking point, Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema feels newly legible. What once seemed niche now reads like a map to our fractured times. As we mark his 100th birth anniversary, his legacy—especially his influence on students Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani—is provoking a fresh round of screenings and conversations. Along with John Abraham, these filmmakers created a kind of cinepedia drawn from myth, epic structure, music and memory—a shift that altered the grammar of Indian cinema.
Ghatak himself was sui generis—one of a kind. His relationship with Kaul and Shahani was less about imitation and more about shared sensibility. Music bound them. For Ghatak, sound was not an accompaniment, but the emotional core of a film. Few directors have used Rabindranath Tagore’s songs with the creative daring and precision that Ghatak brought to them. Kaul worked with dhrupad, Shahani leaned towards khayal, and Ghatak absorbed both, creating sound-worlds where classical forms could speak directly to the politics of partition, displacement, and longing.
The echoes between their works are subtle but unmistakable. The shadow of Ghatak’s unforgettable Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara falls gently on Janaki in Shahani’s Tarang—both women carrying mythic burdens of sacrifice and survival. Ghatak’s ‘epic method’, where certain characters grow beyond the contours of plot into something timeless, can be felt in Kaul’s Siddheshwari. What he gave his students was an orientation: to move past strict realism—even the refined realism of Satyajit Ray—and draw from theatre, folk tales, Sanskrit poetry, and Puranic lore.
Ghatak’s influence continues to travel. Actor Mita Vasisht, who worked extensively with Kaul and Shahani and has just made her first film, speaks of an acting tradition shaped by the “largeness of life”—a phrase echoing Ghatak’s worldview. Shah Rukh Khan, who starred in Kaul’s telefilm Ahmaq (1991) early in his onscreen journey, briefly sparked hope of renewing interest in such cinema when he starred in Amol Palekar’s Paheli (2005), adapted from Kaul’s Duvidha.
Now, as Vasisht searches for theatres willing to screen her film, cineastes wonder if SRK—who has the reach, influence and the means—might help champion the preservation and promotion of India’s great cinematic modernists.