*Satya Narayan Misra in Bhubaneswar, November 4, 2025: Calcutta of the 50s was a veritable cocktail of coffee, culture, and cacophony, where the early seeds of art cinema were being planted by an untrained trio of film aficionados, Ray, Ghatak, and Mrinal. Ghatak was the youngest of the great trinity and lived a short and reckless life, burning it on both ends. His first film, Nagarik (Citizen), was made in 1952 but released after he died in 1977. He made only eight feature films, yet he made a profound impression first on the Bengali intelligentsia and, later on, film buffs all over India.

Working during a period dominated by Satyajit Ray, he struck out on a completely original path-not by design, but by the distinctive nature of his genius. As Vice Principal of FTI, Pune, he deeply influenced a group of students who later on became notable filmmakers, Adoor Gopal Krishna, Mani Kaul , Kumar Sahini & Johhn Borua. His films never won an award, and never went abroad except to make a film in Bangladesh. He died in 1976 of alcohol abuse; yet he remains a cult figure, an anti-establishment hero for many filmmakers and film buffs in India.

Ghatak & Ray

If Ray had been the suitable boy for Indian art cinema, Ghatak would have been a problem child. Whereas Ray’s films were seamless and exquisitely rendered, Ghatak’s are ragged, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspiration. When a retrospective of his films was screened in the New York Film Festival for the first time in 1996, his films came as a revelation to the uninitiated. Of his eight films, Ajantrik (1958) was critically acclaimed. Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) &Subarnarekha (1962) are acknowledged masterpieces whose stature has increased with time. A River called Titas made in 1973 is also a film of unquestioned greatness.

In discussing Ghatak’s craft, it is necessary to note his extraordinary use of sound. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the sound of whiplash is a conventional literary simile for humiliation, transferred to cinema in an oddly effective manner. In Titas, where the young fisherman gets married to his girl, Ghatak introduces a sound of heavy breathing, clearly suggesting sexual union, building it up to a climax. Partha Chatterjee following the retrospective wrote: “You were either singed by the fire of his genius, overwhelmed by his passionate humanism, touched with his childlike simplicity or simply repulsed by the arrogant manners, crass speech & melodramatic posturing of a prophet.” Ghatak shared with his fellow filmmakers of the New Cinema a puritanical streak in the depiction of sexual relationships.

Influence of Tagore

Like Ray, Ghatak was born and bred under the cultural umbrella of Tagore. Ghatak made intensive use of Rabindra sangeet. In Subarnarekha,”Aaj dhaner khetayroudra chayar lookochoori khela”, (Today in the paddy field, light and shadow are playing a hide and seek game ) is a recurring motif, reinforcing at the end, the sense of hope even at the edge of disaster. The use of the song recalls Tagore’s statement:” It is a sin to lose faith in man”. Time and again, Ghatak’s films take us to the brink of despair and retrieve us – often with a Tagore song; much like Ibsen, the Irish playwright.

Partition As The Principal Leitmotif

Ritwik Ghatak’s work discerned most clearly with partition, afull-throated protest against the rhetoric of the triumphalist Indian nation as voiced in Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny Speech. Nehru insisted that “the past is over and it is the future that beckons us”. It embraced the European notion of the nation-state construct. But for Ghatak, it was the loss of subjecthood experienced by a nation’s people, newly divided along arbitrary lines. Rather than trying to dramatize all the physical brutality of partition, Ghatak sought to understand the violence done to human subjecthood by the machinations of the nation-state as it draws and redraws lines on a map. It urges us to think carefully about how we negotiate the difference as we deconstruct history.

Ray, who was an ardent admirer of Ghatak, lamented how Ritwik despite being one of the few original talents in cinema in this country was largely ignored by the Bengali film public, except for the film Meghe Dhaka Tara. Ray wrote, “His lifelong obsession was with the tragedy of partition, single-mindedly dwelling on the same theme set him apart.” He was committed to contemporary reality, with a desire to present to the public eye the crumbling apparatus of a divided Bengal, to awaken the Bengalis to their awareness of their state & concern for their past & the future. Writings of Brecht, and Stanislavski, the allusiveness of Indian music and mythology, the conventions of Bengal & the work of his cinematic heroes Einstein & Bunel impacted him, to create a hybrid of cinematic idiom that moved fluidly between the representational logic of screen realism and expressive potential of stage performance.

His Legacy

Of the eight films he made, my favourite is Meghe Dhaka Tara. Its last scene where the protagonist in the last legs of her life gasping for breath says “Dad Aami Bachte Chai” (Brother, I want to live) still chokes me. I was also blown away by Ajantrik, which was ahead of times. In Bimal Roy’s film “Mathematic” (1958) Ghatak wrote the story and the script. It is an all-time classic where one sees the conflation of two outstanding film makers, Ghatak & Ray. He was shaped by the Brechtian theme of alienation that he first encountered as an IPTA activist through Brecht’s plays. Luis Bunuel, the Spanish filmmaker & his film Nazarin (1959), was Ghatak’s favourite .

Unlike the popular grapevine who tried portray Ray & Ghatak as adversaries, Ghatak considered some sequences of Ray’s Aparajito as ‘Great Cinema’, Ray told Adoor once “Ghatak is someone, who has cinema running in his veins. “Ritwick was a born iconoclast, and came to be known as the enfant terrible of Indian cinema. As he turns 100, he will remain a lodestar in the firmament of Indian cinema, with no parallels, not even imitators. A humanist, more than an ideologue.

*Satya Misra is a film buff