This year marks the birth centenary of the famous film director Ritwik Ghatak. It is a daunting effort – trying to fathom the depths of Ritwik Ghatak’s tortured soul and the times in which he lived, which alone can explain his films.
“Troubled times !” That was how Ritwik described the age in which he was born and worked. It was a rolling cascade of distress. In his own words: “…there came the Second World War, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the fractured Independence that was obtained by the Congress Party and the Muslim League by cutting the country into two halves and plunging it into utter ruin in 1947. There followed the spate of communal warfare between Hindus and Muslims. The waters of the Ganga and Padma rivers became red with the blood of fratricidal killings. These we saw with our own eyes. Our dreams faded away. We fell crashing down, clutching at a wretched and ragged Bengal. What is this Bengal – where poverty and immorality are our regular companions, where black marketeers and dishonest politicians rule the roost, where humanity is doomed to live in horror and distress ?” (Translated from Ritwik’s Bengali article entitled `Amar Chhobi’, or `My Films’, published in a magazine called Sharadiya Film in 1966).
It was this reality of his times that Ritwik portrayed in his films. But his films were not mere documentary records of those `troubled times.’ They were rooted to an ideology. He made a consistent effort to express certain definite ideas through his films – ideas born of the teachings of Marx and Lenin, of the Jungian probe into collective consciousness, his experience in the stage as an activist of the Leftist IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), of his perception of the Indian religio-cultural tradition, his empathy with the rituals and customs of aboriginal tribal communities, his analysis of India’s political situation, and above all – his examination of the rootlessness of the Bengali refugees who migrated from East Bengal to Calcutta and other parts of the country, following the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 on a religious basis. Ritwik’s own home was in East Bengal, which overnight became a part of another nation-state called Pakistan. It alienated thousands of Bengali Hindus, who shared the same language, the same culture as their Muslim counterparts in that part of the country, but who were forced to flee their homeland because of the religious hostilities that accompanied the “fractured Independence” – the term used by Ritwik to describe the political transition.
But although he dealt in his films with these socio-political problems and culture-specific concerns of his contemporary Bengali society (from the 1950s till the 1970s), Ritwik could to some extent, surmount the confines of the local contemporaneity, and at times touch a chord of eternal concerns among sections of a wider audience even outside Bengal. In portraying the trauma of the loss of homes among refugees from East Pakistan, which recurs in most of his films for instance, he tried to turn it into a metaphor for the universal sense of rootlessness and alienation suffered by individuals and communities. Still today – more than thirty years after his death – in his own Bengal, his films continue to haunt sensitive sections of the present generation. They hear in them loud echoes of their present plight – as bluntly described by Ritwik in the last sentence of the above quoted article of his. In his films, he mercilessly ripped apart post-Independence Bengali middle class society and its political leadership, exposing their hypocrisy and evils – which still continue to bedevil today’s West Bengal.
Even in films not directly dealing with the aftermath of the 1947 Partition – like Ajantrik and Bari Thekey Paliye – Ritwik evoked sentiments that acquired universal dimensions. He could convey the pangs of loneliness in the mechanical world of the machine that lead a driver to desperately seek an emotional relationship with his car. Watching Ajantrik (without French sub-titles) for the first time at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, the renowned French film critic Georges Sadoul wrote: “Just as the driver fell in love with his car Jagaddal – however reckless, strange and whimsical it might seem – I have also fallen head over heels in love with this film !” (Quoted in the Bengali magazine Chitrabikshan, January-April, 1976). The experiences of the truant boy in the nooks and crannies of a strange metropolis in Bari Thekey Paliye, should sound familiar to people living in modern industrial environs in any part of the world.
Inventing an indigenous film language
But Ritwik’s distinctiveness lay not only in the selection of certain historically important subjects, or contemporary relevant concerns. He tried to innovate a particular style of film making to express his ideas. It bears the unmistakable stamp of his individuality – in the same sense that the silent films made by the German filmmakers in the 1920s could have been made only in the Germany of those days, or in the same way that the films of the modern Japanese film makers indicate a specific Japanese way of expression. Often, by departing radically from the prevalent filmic style and modifying it to adapt it to the Bengali cultural forms (found in traditional commercial theatre and folk-jatra ), or tribal rituals in the Bengal-Bihar border region, Ritwik seems to have evolved an indigenous film language.
In this context, let me point out that the language and grammar of cinematography are still evolving, and going through a phase of multifarious experiments. Some directors have discarded altogether the story element, and sought to create the mood or convey the message through an imaginative arrangement of visuals, music and dialogue. Jean-Luc Godard for instance, in the 1960s often overturned the conventional and familiar norms of dialogue by using on the soundtrack the blaring slogans of commercial ads and Leftist polemics, and choosing characters from comic strips. Modern Japanese film directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi or Kurusowa on the other hand have gone back to their indigenous traditional cultural resources like `Kabuki’, or historical forms like the `chanbara’ sword dances. The Samurai and his rituals become oriental counterparts of the cowboy and his swashbuckling role in the Westerns. In the delivery of the dialogues, or in gestures and movements, the characters often sound loud or even melodramatic (conforming, as they are required to do, to the traditional style of performance). This may grate on the sensibilities of those who derive their fastidious standards from conventional European films. But why should one judge these films by a Euro-centric yardstick ? Why should we not learn to accept their film language as a part of their own distinct cultural tradition ? Recognizing the need to respect the originality of such a style in the films of Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray felt that although they were not influenced by the prevalent Western style of film making, they were “original and fundamental enough to necessitate a thorough reassessment of the so-called first principle of cinematography.” (Quoted in `Film Book I`, edited by Robert Hughes, Grove Press, New York, 1959).
It is in this perspective that it is necessary to assess Ritwik Ghatak’s film style. He once stated: “The era of narrating a story in films is over; it is now the time for making a statement through films.” Although he did not totally give up the narrative style, he did indeed break up the traditional linear story line by a variety of stylistic interruptions to make a statement, and thus invented a filmic language of his own. He used techniques, motifs and ideas from the Bengali folk theatre genre called jatra; the Indian cinema of the 1930-40 period; tribal rituals and dances; and Hindu mythology among other things. It is interesting to watch how Ritwik made use of a familiar technique from jatra and traditional Indian filmography. In these forms, for instance, a song is sung in its entirety. In Western filmography, such a device is reserved only for the genre called `musicals’ in Hollywood, while in other films, only snatches of a song or a musical script are used on the soundtrack to explain an emotional moment perhaps. Ritwik in his films, used a song as a whole, to express a certain mood of a character, or at a crucial moment of the narrative. For songs, most of the time Ritwik depended on Rabindranath Tagore’s lyrics, and he knew how best to fit them into the sequences. Listen for instance to the song `Aaj jyotsna rate sabai gechhey boney…” (On this moon-lit night, everyone has gone to the forests…while I’m alone in my room..) in Komal-gandhar during a poignant moment in the life of the heroine Anasuya.
Or, in Jukti-takko-Gappo, where the hero Neelkantha recalls a song by Tagore to show his affection to the mother-figure Bangabala – the girl who arrived in Calcutta, fleeing the war-torn East Pakistan in 1971. The songs on the sound track with the camera panning across the faces of the figures or scenes, accentuate the personal dilemma of the characters, and also lend a historical dimension to the message that Ritwik wants to convey. By using these songs, Ritwik also re-invented Tagore and re-established the relevance of his songs for a new generation.
The other motif that he borrowed from the traditional Bengali jatra and theatre was that of a stereotype – a character marked by an exaggerated style of acting or idiosyncratic delivery of dialogue. The famous actor Bijon Bhattacharya was quite often put in this role in Ritwik’s films – usually as an idealistic school teacher from East Bengal, speaking in the dialect of that area. While in the old Bengali theatre, the highly affected style of delivery of dialogues by such characters became a cliché, in Ritwik’s films the same style, used at decisive moments, ignited a spark in the minds of the audience. Who for instance, can ever forget the sudden appearance of the ghost-like face of Bijon (in the role of Haraprasad) in Subarnarekha peeping through the window with his question (uttered in the typical East Bengali dialect) aimed at the would-be suicide Ishwar – “How long is the night ?”. It is a query loaded with memories and fears of an unending nightmare. Or again, Bijon Bhattacharya in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo , living up to the typical role as the teacher of Sanskrit, Jagannath, who indulges in stock quotations from the ancient classical texts.
The use of `coincidences’ as a filmic form
Let me come to the other familiar device used by Ritwik in his films – manipulation of concurrence of events. He arranged coincidences often in defiance of all natural laws. The frequency of too many accidental encounters in his films is again reminiscent of the old Bengali theatres and films.
This had led highbrow critics to accuse Ritwik of contriving situations at the cost of authenticity. Rarely does a brother, they point out, walk accidentally into his sister’s room in a whorehouse (as happens in Subarnarekha). But then, there are a lot of things which never take place in reality, and yet find place in art. Do we see in real life the sky of Van Gogh, or the human figures of Picasso ? Yet, the highly extravagant colours and the distorted lines, notwithstanding the objections by stickers for authentic reproduction, touch responsive chords in sensitive souls. The poetry of art can prevail over the grammar of everyday life. The prime point is whether the `unreal’ coincidences, or the exaggerated stereotypes, or the songs, stick out like scarecrows (as they do in most of the current commercial movies), or do they flow effortlessly along the main current of the narrative (as in Ritwik’s films) ? Incidentally, Ritwik himself defended his use of coincidences in Subarnarekha : “I have been frequently accused of using coincidences in Subarnarekha. It is true that the number of coincidences in that film is very high. But the main incident in the film – the brother intending to visit a brothel happens to stumble into his sister’s room there – is such a big coincidence that I have tried to use coincidence itself as a form. Right from the beginning, I have tried to alert the audience about the sequence of coincidences. There is a fun in the use of this form. You can describe it as in the tradition of the epic style. At the same time, by investing these coincidences with larger suggestive dimensions, I tried to make them pregnant with meaning. For instance, if one remembers the main point that was to be established – the brother’s entering his sister’s room – one has to understand that this man could have gone into any other girl’s room, but even then that girl would essentially remain his sister. Here, it has only been dragged into, and shown in a mechanical way. Here the purpose was to imbue the particular event with suggestions of the generality.” (`On Subarnarekha’ in the Bengali magazine Chitrabeekshan, January-April, 1976)
This interpretation by Ritwik, takes us beyond the confines of that particular sequence in Subarnarekha, and brings us into the territory of gender discourse. He opens up a can of worms – shaking up the conservative Bengali middle class audience to a whole lot of uncomfortable questions that plague their homes – incestuousness, male predatory instincts, imposition of patriarchal norms on the female members of their families, humiliation of the female which ends up with her bloody suicide – Sita slitting her throat at the sight of her brother invading her sexual space.
Aboriginal culture and Hindu mythology
Another interesting style that Ritwik devised was the use of tribal cultural performances as well as motifs of Hindu mythology at certain junctures in his film narratives. The adivasis, or the aboriginal tribal people inhabiting the Bihar-West Bengal border region (known as Jangalmahal – literally meaning a forest habitat), quite frequently appear in Ritwik’s films. There are scenes of tribal ritualistic dances in Ajantrik, and Jukti Takko Aar Gappo. They form long sequences that may appear irrelevant to the main narrative. But Ritwik used them as a cinematic form to convey a message. It was to introduce the element of the eternal in the midst of a story that recorded a fragment of a passing life stream. These adivasi dances are part of tribal rituals associated with the rites of passage, during the main stages in the eternal life cycle – birth, marriage and death. Writing about the dance of the Oraon tribals in Chhotanagpur in Bihar, about whom he made a film in the mid-1950s, Ritwik observed: “These dances create the atmosphere which suddenly makes you aware that you are witnessing a scene which is as old as the history of man in India. The tunes, the sound, the spectacle make you realize what vigour and joy of life is. They are precious because they invoke in you the primary emotions.” (`Cinema and I’. Calcutta. 1987).
These tribal dances also establish the primacy of women, who are the main dancers while the males are accompanists, beating on the drums to provide the rhythms. It can be read as a metaphor for the dual sexual roles of the participants. The women who are recognized as the source of creativity for their power and patience to give birth to life, hold their hands and dance in a fairly long gentle unison. The male drummers however beat their drums at a feverish pace. Do their drum beats symbolize the male strokes that make their women give birth to a new life ?
In Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan brings together these male and female principles in an interesting sequence. He shows the mask of Chandi (the goddess of power) to the girl Bangabala. This mask, he tells the girl, is put on by the male Chhau dancer when performing in the role of Chandi in the scene of the killing of the demon in the Hindu mythological tale of Mahishamardini (where the goddess slays the demon who had assumed the form of mahisha or buffalo). When Bangabala wants to dance, Panchanan at first dissuades her saying that according to the traditional norms of Chhau, women are forbidden to dance in the performance. The goddess Chandi, he says, takes on the form of a male to dance in the role of the demon-killer. Is this exchange of gender roles in the Chhau performance prompted by the need to project the warrior image of the mother-goddess – which Panchanan thinks can be better represented by the muscular male performer ? But Bangabala, by her assertiveness already commands the obedience of Panchanan (who addresses her by the term ma-thakarun, which literally means `revered mother’ – used by males from the lower orders to address women from a superior caste or class, irrespective of their age, in Bengali society). The Chhau dancer finally concedes: “Yes – you will dance, my mother ! Unless you women dance, nothing will happen. Dance…dance…”
Jukti Takko Aar Gappo also presents in one sequence, an encounter between the tribal psyche and the upper caste Brahminical interpretation of Hindu mythology. The argument between the Sanskrit teacher Jagannath and the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan brings to the fore the chasm between the classical Sanskrit-oriented literary stream of the educated elite, and the aboriginal cultural tradition of the lower orders. As Panchanan explains to Bangabala the various incarnations of the mother goddess in his own home-spun way, Jagannath interrupts him by quoting Sanskrit verses to interpret them according to the Hindu scriptures. Tired of listening to Jagannath’s quotations, at one stage Panchanan explodes: “Stop your ang-bang ” (a dig at the Sanskrit word-endings). “These words,” he adds, “are foreign to me…” The Sanskrit teacher asks him in surprise: “But how can Sanskrit be foreign ?” Panchanan retorts: “Of course it is. Who speaks Sanskrit in our land ?”
But like the performing arts of tribal life, Sanskrit scriptures and literature were also used by Ritwik in his films. He delved into ancient texts like the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas, or Sanskrit classics like Abigyana Shakuntalam by the famous poet and playwright Kalidasa of fifth century A.D., to borrow motifs and re-interpret them in order to shape the image of the `archetype’ – a term which he himself was fond of using when writing about his films. This `archetype’ again was built around the role of the woman. From Meghe Dhaka Tara to Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, in almost all the films, he evokes mythological associations that hark back to the archetypal mother goddess Durga – in various forms, from the role of the ascetic Uma to that of the destructive Kali. Explaining the recurrence of this image in his films, Ritwik said: “In my films, I have tried to lose myself, totally drunk in these traditions.” He then added: “…our civilization has known this Great Mother intimately since primeval times, both in her benevolent and terrible forms. And through our myths, our epics, our scriptures and our folklore, this archetype has reached out to us at every level of understanding.” (Movie Montage, 1967).
Heroines like Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara, Anasuya in Komal Gandhar, and Sita in Subarnarekha, recall the story of Uma, the daughter of the god of the Himalayas, as described in the ancient myths. It is the story of a young girl, pining for her lover (Shiva) and resorting to austere practices of worshipping to gain him, till she reduces herself almost to a skeleton. Her story had been a part of the collective memory, primarily of the Bengali Hindu society. In these films, Ritwik transposes this mythological image to his contemporary Bengali society, where he projects his heroines as modern Umas, struggling to fulfill their respective dreams. Their objectives differ, but it is the essence – the intensity of their pursuit and the sacrifices that they make – that bring them together to fit into the `archetype’ that Ritwik was trying to formulate. Through snatches of dialogues and songs, incantations on the sound track in certain sequences, he recalls the mythological story and tries to nudge the collective memory.
Nita in Meghe Dhaka Tara, for instance, sacrifices everything to take care of her family, and finally ends up with tuberculosis. Significantly, at the end of the film, Ritwik brings her to the mountains – reminiscent of Uma’s birth from the Himalayan god – where Nita cries: “I want to live”, with the shadow of death in her eyes. Explaining the scene, Ritwik said that he wanted to “convey the entire allegorical connection of Uma – the wife of the Lord of Destruction – who has been the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengali households for centuries – with the protagonist.” (Filmfare magazine, 1967 – quoted in `Ritwik Ghatak’, published by the Directorate of Film Festivals, New Delhi. 1982). Anasuya in Komal Gandhar, however fights for her beliefs and lives to attain her wishes, like Uma meeting her lover at the end of her austerities. Spurning her other supplicant – the better off Samar who lives in France – she decides to join her partner Bhrigu in the theatre movement (to whom she is emotionally and intellectually attached), facing all the uncertainties. Commenting on the role of Anasuya, Ritwik said: “The heroine of this film is the Shakuntala of Bengal…” Here he goes back to the story of Shakuntala (as described by Kalidasa in his classic play), to describe the divided mind of Anasuya – torn between her past roots and her uncertain future. “When going to her husband’s place,” Ritwik reminds us, “Shakuntala had to tear herself away from the ashram (where she grew up), her very familiar world, the land where she had lived from the day of her birth.” (Movie Montage magazine, 1967).
In Subarnarekha, the archetype reappears, again revolving around a woman – the heroine Sita. As a child, she wanders along an empty runway (an abandoned airfield left from the days of the Second World War – a reminder of the air raids and bombings). She suddenly encounters a terrifying image of the destructive goddess Kali. It turns out to be a travelling showman who earns his living by entertaining people by assuming various disguises. The frightened Sita runs blindly away – but only to be haunted for the rest of her life by a trail of destructive events. Kali is the “Terrible Mother” – the term used by Ritwik while explaining that particular sequence in the film. Describing it as the “one archetypal image that has been haunting us from a remote past,” he said: “(it) is today confronting us all over the world. You may call it by many names: the Hydrogen Bomb, or Strategic Air Command…It is the power of annihilation, the ability to destroy, and perhaps, like little Sita, we have suddenly found ourselves confronted by it…” (Movie Montage magazine, 1967)
But it is in Ritwik’s last film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, that the women characters break away from the archetypal roles of suffering and sacrificing females. Durga, the wife of the alchoholic hero Nilkantha, in a move of protest, leaves her husband. Bangabala, the young refugee girl from Bangladesh, is a rebellious creature – outspoken and breaking rules. It is no wonder that Durga and Bangabala get into a brief bond of affection towards the end of the film when the former asks her to stay back. But even then, true to his style, Ritwik invokes several archetypal images. The choice of the name Nilkantha for the hero is significant. It is associated with the old mythological story of the churning of the oceans in search of amrita, the elixir of life, in the course of which along with many other things, poison also came out. In order to save the world from being destroyed by it, the god Shiva took it upon himself to drink the poison. The poison made his throat blue – which gave him the name Nilkantha (the one with the blue throat). In Ritwik’s film, his hero all through his aimless wanderings, seems to be distilling poison from the various bitter experiences – the degeneration of his once politically committed friends, listening to Bangabala’s plight, and engaging in the futile political arguments with the Naxalite revolutionaries in the forest on the eve of his death. Similarly, the unemployed and distressed youth in the film acquires his name Nachiketa from a mythological character who was destined to visit hell because of a curse by his enraged father.
‘Rows of Walls’
But how far did these innovative devices of Ritwik’s to create a distinctive film language, impact on his audience ?
Although Ritwik derived some of these devices from indigenous sources like tribal rituals and Hindu mythology, they seemed to have gone over the heads of his contemporary Bengali audience. None of his films was a box office hit. The general indifference to his filmic style of presentation disappointed Ritwik, as he watched the audience and critics responding only to certain parts of the contents of his films while rejecting the basic ideas that he was trying to communicate through his form. His films dealing with the uprooted Bengali middle class in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, were being interpreted as melodramatic trips to a nostalgic past and a distressing present. In his numerous writings, Ritwik tried to rescue his films from such misinterpretation.
The problem is rooted to the dissociation between the stylistic devices that Ritwik chose, and those that his audience were familiar with in the commercial film media. We should remember that the bulk of the audience of his films in Bengal were the urban and suburban middle class people. To them, tribal culture always remained alien. Even the appeal of Bengali folk rituals or songs like Panchali, Agamani-Bijoya, or wedding songs (strains of which Ritwik often used on the sound track in certain sequences in his films) was lost upon the urban Bengali audience. These cultural forms, with which Ritwik grew up during his childhood in the past East Bengal, had disappeared by the 1960s from the middle class society of Calcutta. The only aspects of Ritwik’s style which had had some appeal for the Bengali middle class viewers were the devices borrowed from the old theatres and films – the use of songs, the frequency of accidents and coincidences, a tendency towards the melodramatic in certain situations. Having been fond of these well-established conventions over generations, the Bengali urban and semi-urban audience found it easy to accept them. It is for this reason that the highly melodramatic sequences in Subarnarekha of all of Ritwik’s films, still remain popular with the Bengali viewers.
As for the motifs derived from aboriginal rituals and popular myths, may be the tribals and the Bengali rural populace who are still attuned to these traditional cultural forms, could have responded to this part of Ritwik’s cinematography more spontaneously – if however they could ever get a chance to watch his films (living as they were in the remotest corners of the country, cut off from all media facilities) ! But, then there was another problem. These motifs are used by Ritwik to express ideas which are rooted exclusively to the problems of estranged middle class individuals in a hostile metropolis – ideas which are far removed from the existential concerns of the rural poor. (The only film of his which was totally based on rural reality was Titash Ekti Nodir Naam, filmed in 1973 in Bangladesh – his birthplace which he had a chance to revisit after decades only a few years before his death to shoot the film).
The characters in Ritwik’s films are lost and alienated souls from the urban petty bourgeois milieu. Even when Ritwik takes them away to a rural locale (as in Komal Gandhar, or Jukti Takko Aar Gappo), their thinking is bound by their urban existence. Most of them are displaced from their homes by the 1947 Partition, or some socio-economic distress, trying to survive in Calcutta and its suburbs. Some are young dreamers in this alien city, denied the chance to build their future, as Ramu, the hero of his first film (which was significantly entitled Nagarik, meaning citizen). In this film, a poverty-stricken middle class family ends up in a slum, trying to build a new future out of the ruins of their existence. In the films that followed, we come across the lonely taxi-driver Bimal in Ajantrik, who establishes a human relationship with a car. Another is a truant child Kanchan in Bari Thekey Paliye, who runs away from his village home to Calcutta and suddenly becomes an adult after having been exposed to the world of the metropolis. The others are uprooted refugees from East Bengal, seeking shelter in Calcutta or elsewhere, and trying to cope with the conflict between nostalgia for the past and compulsion to adjust to the present.
These subjects and ideas, primarily rooted to urban middle class experiences, were as alien to the tribals and villagers of Bengal, as were the traditional folk motifs that he used in his films, to his urban Bengali audience. There thus seems to be a disjunction between Ritwik’s themes and the cinematic style that he adopted, however innovative and exciting the latter might have been. Ritwik himself realized the limitations of his style, of his efforts to interlace tribal and folk rituals with modern narratives. Commenting on the long sequence of tribal dances in Ajantrik, he admitted: “..these symbols, in their sporadic presentation, could not become universal. Had I been a bit more conscious, these symbols could have perhaps broken out from the four walls of their familiar surroundings, and found a new meaning.” (`A few thoughts on Ajantrik in `Chalacchitra, Manush ebong Aaro Kichhu’. Calcutta. 1975.) In another important essay in the same above-mentioned collection, he spoke of the “rows of walls” that separated the film maker from the audience. One such wall was the `pulse of the audience.’ On behalf of the film makers, he said: “…our continuous and ardent effort is to feel their (the audience’s) pulse and count the beats. But our capacity to perceive the movements of the pulse is very limited…” He then turned to the audience, and said: “You are also a great wall. Perhaps, the biggest wall.”
Complaining that the audience were not prepared to accept films made in a new style, he reminded them of both the mythology of the past and the rural cultural heritage (the sources which Ritwik used for the new style that he tried to innovate): “Our country is the land of Ramayana and Mahabharata. You would not hear in many countries the philosophy that our peasants talk about.” Among the other `walls’ that separated the new film makers and the audience, were the commercial interests against whom Ritwik raised his fingers in that essay – producers, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry – who were driven by the profit motive to sponsor certain types of films, and keep other films dumped in the can.
Many arguments, debates – and a little chit-chat
These contradictions at the various levels of relationship between cinema as an art form on the one hand, and the people as an audience on the other, remained a cause of intellectual introspection with Ritwik till the end. In his last film made in 1974 – Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (which when translated, literally means `Arguments, debates and chit-chat’), he tried to capture the different facets of this multi-dimensional complex relationship on a wider socio-political scale.
The events in this film take place in 1971, when the Bengali ethos was going through a drastic change. In West Bengal, the armed rebellion of the Naxalite youth against a corrupt and degenerate administrative and political system, had churned up the stagnant pool of the socio-economic status quo. In the countryside, conflicts between landlords and the landless were taking a violent form. Across the border, in the then East Pakistan, the Bengalis had launched a liberation struggle. The Pakistani military crackdown against it had led to the migration of thousands from there into West Bengal. In his personal life also, Ritwik was facing a crisis. Caught up in the toils of dejection, caused primarily by the poor reception of his films and financial problems, Ritwik had been increasingly seeking refuge in alcohol. “Somehow I feel,” he said, “alcohol is the final salvation.” (Quoted in the magazine Chitrapat, No. 10). Financial difficulties forced his wife to take up a job in a town far away from Calcutta. His home in Calcutta lay desolate. This becomes the peg on which he hangs the narrative of the film.
Ritwik himself acts in the role of the hero Nilkantha – a disillusioned Leftist intellectual who becomes an alcoholic. Abandoned by his wife, he winds up his home and lands up in the streets of Calcutta. The concept of displacement which recurs in his earlier films (where most of the characters are exiles from the post-Partition East Bengal) reappears here in the form of a variety of rootless figures – an unemployed youth called Nachiketa, a fugitive girl Bangabala fleeing her home from civil-war torn East Pakistan, Jagannath who is a penniless teacher of Sanskrit. Collecting these fellow-sufferers as his companions, Nilkantha starts his quixotic journey. The odyssey – without any specific destination – becomes a metaphor for the rewarding experiences that a traveller can gain. More important than reaching the uncertain goal, is the knowledge and friendships that the traveller (i.e. the audience) acquires during the odyssey.
In the course of the journey, Ritwik arranges a series of encounters between different – often opposite – segments of the people of our society. There is a meeting between the failed Nilkantha and his old friend from his political past, a writer called Shatrujit who is now a successful writer; a debate between the Sanskrit teacher Jagannath and the tribal Chhau dancer Panchanan; a scene where helpless silence and aggressive verbosity meet each other when Nachiketa looking for a job in a factory has to listen to a political leader haranguing the striking workers; a fight between the tribal poor and the landlord over possession of land which leads to the accidental killing of Jagannath; the love and hate relationship between Nachiketa and Bangabala which ends up in their coming close to each other under a tree in a forest. And finally, we are brought to the forest where the last encounter takes place between Nilkantha and the band of young Naxalite revolutionaries.
It is in this final encounter that Ritwik makes his political statement, under the alias of Nilkantha. Nilkantha becomes yet another `archetype’ – the representative of the Bengali middle class intellectual, who frustrated with his past experiences, makes a last bid to cling to a hope for change. His soul is lacerated by failures and disappointments, and stung with disgust at the surrounding reality. Yet, in this tortured soul of his, he still nurses a niche of affection for the young revolutionaries who are trying to change the world. In the forest, where he meets them, Nilkantha greets them with words that try to link up with his own political past : “You are the only ones who remain from my Bengal – there’s nothing else left.” Then he voices his old hope: “You will snatch the future, whatever happens,” and adds: “That’s why I want to understand you – what are you thinking ?” During his arguments with them, he expresses his own disappointment with the way in which the Indian political leadership obtained Independence: “..this great betrayal in 1947…the bourgeoisie stabbing the national liberation movement behind the back…on August 15 of that year…the great betrayal…Independence…my foot !” But the dialogue between Nilkantha and the Naxalites leads nowhere. He does not understand the language of these young people, and he ends up by saying: “I’m confused, fully confused. I’m at a loss, groping in the darkness. May be all of us are confused.” Yet, Nilkantha chooses to stay back with these revolutionaries, and at the end dies facing bullets from the police force that attacks the Naxalite den. It reminds us of Rudin, the hero of Turgenev’s novel, who became a martyr joining the rebels at the barricades. Explaining his choice, Nilkantha (who is the alias of Ritwik) tells his wife when she comes to see her during his dying moments: “I had to do something…do something…”
After uttering those words, Ritwik (as Nilkantha) in his typical style, ends the film with an allusion loaded with political symbolism which he borrowed from a story by the famous Bengali author Manik Bandyopadhyay. Nilkantha reminds his wife of the handloom weaver Madan in that story (entitled Shilpi, or The Artist). Madan leads the rest of the weavers of his village in a strike – refusing to operate their looms in protest against the middleman’s usury. But one night, the weavers are surprised to hear the sounds of the loom coming from Madan’s house. Fearing that their leader has let them down, they gather around Madan’s hut. Madan asks them in and shows them the bare loom – which carries no thread ! But then, why was he operating the loom ? Smiling sheepishly, Madan tells them that he was about to get gout in his joints from the long spell of idleness. “I had to do something,” he adds.
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It was this urge to `do something’ that kept Ritwik going. It is to his credit that notwithstanding the ups and downs in the political environment and in his personal life, he kept the loom of his intellect in operation till the last. A film maker is both an artist and an artisan. It was not a coincidence therefore that Ritwik chose the words of the artisan Madan as his last testament on screen. Refusing to succumb to the `distressing times’ and go under, he desperately clung to a hope – hope for a new life. The archetypes from the mythological narratives, aboriginal rituals and performances, Bengali folklore, and the eternal rhythms of nature which symbolized the continuity of life, provided Ritwik with this hope. In his last but one film Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (1973), the river Titash which was the mother of the fishing folk, dries up and dies, driving out her children from their homes. But a paddy field is born on the dry river bed, and a new civilization begins. The last vision of the dying heroine Basanti is of a child running through the paddy fields playing on a leaf whistle.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
