One of the best times I have had at the movies was watching a newly-restored print of Ritwik Ghatak’s 1958 film Ajantrik (known variously in English as The Mechanical Man or The Pathetic Fallacy) at the 2019 Pingyao International Film Festival in China. It felt entirely felicitous for a film about a man’s love for his rundown car to play in a diesel-engine plant of Mao Zedong’s times that had been redeveloped into the sprawling Festival Palace. The screening happened in the presence of one of Ghatak’s beloved students, filmmaker Kumar Shahani, and the Chinese icon Jia Zhangke.
Ajantrik took the average Chinese viewer—for whom Indian cinema seemed to begin and end with Aamir Khan’s Dangal and 3 Idiots—by surprise. That a 60-year-old black-and-white film could have them emotionally invested, all by humanising an inanimate object. For the young students of cinema, the man-machine dialectic, the formal experimentation, and especially the sound effects made the film way ahead of its time.
Ghatak’s Chevrolet called ‘Jagaddal’ foreshadowed the Volkswagen Beetle in Disney’s Herbie franchise without ever getting acknowledged. Much like Ghatak himself, who didn’t get the recognition he deserved in his short lifetime of 50 years in which he made eight films. No wonder filmmaker Saeed Mirza, also his student at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, compares Ghatak to a shooting star that flashes past brightly before dying out.
The stint of the hard-to-pin-down genius, in both cinema and life, may have been short, but the legends around him are many, appropriately getting recollected now to mark his centenary last week. His brief stewardship of the FTII in the late 1960s, the iconic Wisdom Tree in the FTII campus where he used to hold his addas with students—from Adoor Gopalakrishnan to Subhash Ghai—is the stuff of folklore. Ghai calls him his first guru.
“He changed my perception of cinema. I had grown up watching Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, and Raj Kapoor. He introduced me to Godard and Fellini. He induced lateral thinking in us, made us see beyond the usual in both cinema and life,” says Ghai.
For Mirza, the biggest takeaway was the attitude towards films: “He made us see them as sacred. That we had our name attached to our film and could therefore not let it down. He made us conscious of being respectful towards our work.”
One of the leading names behind CPI’s cultural wing, the Indian People’s Theatre Association, for Ghatak, all forms of arts were about fostering dissent as a means to channelling change rather than persisting with the status quo.
His work is celebrated most for portraying the pain of Bengal’s partition through a singular sense of melodrama. Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E Flat, 1961) and Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965) formed the trilogy that not only documented a tumultuous moment in the nation’s recent history, but its aftereffects on the lives of refugees—like his own family—from the erstwhile East Pakistan.
The cry of Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) in the finale of Meghe Dhaka Tara— “Dada ami bachte chai (Brother, I want to live)”—continues to haunt audiences as does the exploration of caste politics in the light of displacement in Subarnarekha. “His entire journey was full of some incredible films. But he could be incredibly erratic stylistically within a film, shifted around with style with every film. Yet, there were moments and leaps of pure brilliance,” says Mirza.
For filmmaker-designer-author Joy Bimal Roy, Ghatak was ‘Bhoba Baba’ who wrote his father Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958) after having worked with him at New Theatres in Kolkata. “Our families had known each other from their days in Dhaka, before they came to Kolkata in search of better prospects,” says Roy.
In Ghatak’s hands, the popular theme of rebirth, of eternal love transcending time, also became all about breaking social class barriers and making a strong statement against the zamindari system’s entrenched patriarchy. Ghatak co-wrote the screenplay of another Hindi film, Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s directorial debut Musafir (1957). A triptych of stories about three sets of consecutive tenants in the same house, the last of them starring a melancholic Dilip Kumar, set the tone for the theme of death that came to inform several of Mukherjee’s films.
Mirza recollects that there was something very vulnerable about Ghatak as a person, yet he was incredibly assured, the infamous alcoholism notwithstanding.
Joy Bimal Roy remembers meeting Ghatak the first time when he landed unannounced in the early 1970s at the Godiwala Bungalow, their home in Bandra. “He looked like he had seen better days. His entire demeanour was one of defeat, someone at the end of his tether. His clothes looked as though they hadn’t been washed in a long time and he also appeared to be a bit tipsy,” writes Roy.
Soon, Ghatak came over again. He spoke about how he had not been able to make a film in years, but was planning to write a script, which could get him funds from the National Film Development Corporation. Roy’s mother promptly invited him to stay with them while he wrote the script. What she didn’t bargain for was the problem of drinking. It was her anger at his ways and the censure from her that eventually made him turn a corner, even if for a little while, to complete the script of Jukti Takko Aar Goppo.
The film went on to win the national award for best story in 1974. It also proved to be Ghatak’s last, one which could get released only posthumously in 1977—a couple of weeks after his first, Nagarik (The Citizen), saw the light of the day 25 years after it was made.
Read all columns by Namrata Joshi
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
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