Ritwik Ghatak’s birth centenary on Tuesday is an opportune moment to review the legacy of one of India’s most accomplished filmmakers, who, alas, died in February 1976 — a few months after his 50th birthday.Born in Dhaka, Ghatak was deeply impacted by the tumultuous events that were unfolding in the run-up to World War II and convulsed the Indian Subcontinent, then under colonial rule. The political turbulence of the Quit India movement, the horrors of the Bengal famine and the communal violence of 1946, followed by Partition in August 1947, were searing experiences. His birthplace became East Pakistan and the severance and dislocation from “home” was agonising for the young refugee.AdvertisementThe trauma and anguish of his beloved homeland being starved due to colonial machinations and later divided along a religious divide, and the scale of the human suffering that ensued due to this abrupt change in identity and citizenship, were internalised by the young Ghatak. He carried this heavy cross all his life and distilled this angst in his early creative pursuits — acting and writing.Drawn to theatre, Ghatak acted in his first play in 1939 as a 14-year old. He had an abiding association with the stage. His first short story was published in 1946 and soon after came his foray into writing on film — an article on cinema, ‘A new stage in the acting game’. An active member of the Communist Party of India, Ghatak immersed himself in political activism and Marxist ideology. In a short period, he produced an impressive body of work – two novels and almost 100 short stories and plays. His biographers note that the 1944 production of Bijon Bhattacharya’s play Nabanna, on the Bengal famine, proved a turning point for Ghatak. He later spoke of how “thoroughly shaken” he was by this play and joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association. This was the formative period for Ghatak, who toured Bengal extensively with the theatre group and wrote, acted in and directed various plays — all rooted in the exploitation, suffering and trauma of the uprooted and underprivileged.IPTA activists and directors such as K A Abbas and Nemai Ghosh recognised the power of cinema, and soon Ghatak was engaged in learning about the celluloid medium with his contemporaries — Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Mrinal Sen. Soaking up the available Western cinema of that period, Ghatak read avidly, as he recalled, anything he could access “in preparation for the future”. The list included Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kracauer, Paul Rotha and Roger Manville among other stalwarts.AdvertisementThe trigger for Ghatak’s debut film, Nagarik, was the first International Film Festival of India (IFFI) held in 1952 in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras. A Soviet film delegation that included Pudovkin and Cherkasov visited India that year and this was a golden learning opportunity for Ghatak and his peers — Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Bimal Roy. The two events were seminal for Ghatak and he later acknowledged that they enabled him to take the plunge and make Nagarik.Unfortunately, this film made in 1952 was not released for 25 years, and this was one of many tragedies that afflicted Ghatak’s professional trajectory. His second film, Ajantrik, was released in 1958 and it was followed by the high-point of the Ghatak oeuvre — the Partition trilogy. Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha were released in 1960-62 to critical acclaim, but that did not translate into commercial success and international fame.Ghatak made just eight feature films (and many documentaries) before he died in 1976 — these include the suicidal Jukti, Takko aar Gappo (1974). His films dealt with the fragmentation of his beloved motherland, the river Titash/Padma and the many privations heaped on the vulnerable individual, ineffectually grappling with the vicissitudes of history and providence.Dwelling on Ghatak’s relentless, unalloyed focus on exploring the personal devastation and the collective debris of Bengal’s partition, film scholar Ira Bhaskar notes: “In a paranoiac exorcism he returned to the theme again and again in his films. This seething discontent and frustration led him to grapple with the primeval riddle of life and its meaning. Going beneath the socio-historical layers, Ghatak confronted and effectively dealt with the mythic under-structure of civilisation.” She adds, “His films reveal a comprehension of myth, archetypes, symbolism and allegory that remain unparalleled to-date in the context of Indian cinema.” (disclaimer — I am Ira’s spouse).His last film, Jukti, Takko aar Gappo, was a tragic grand finale to his finding solace in alcohol and heralded his death. Ostensibly depicting the disintegration of a compulsive alcoholic, at a deeper level the film engaged with the fragmentation not only of Bengal but of a wounded civilisation.There is a subtext of universality in Ghatak’s intense sculpting of the mythic on celluloid, contextualised against the backdrop of riverine Bengal and the primeval mother goddess. On his birth centenary, the same rhythms of history are discernible across the world — alienation, fragmentation, loss of citizenship and the fear of becoming a refugee or victim in one’s own land.most readGhatak aficionados have often pondered over what would have been the history of Indian cinema if Nagarik had been released in 1953. The adulation that Satyajit Ray received after Pather Panchali and the success associated with Mrinal Sen must have shaped Ghatak’s sense of having been obscured by his peers.To his credit, Ray was generous in his admiration for Ghatak and noted that as “a creator of powerful images in an epic style, he was virtually unrivalled in Indian cinema”.Would Ghatak have raised his glass (bottle?) in agreement, or dismissed such praise, as was his wont?The writer is director, Society for Policy Studies