For Ritwik Ghatak, the Draupadi-like Neeta (Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) was the critical lens to observe the dialectical contradictions of social conflicts: tradition vs modernity, individual vs collective, myth vs history. For his Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, protégé John Abraham — no, not the beefed-up Bollywood actor but the maverick Malayalam director — a donkey becomes a dialectical symbol (both sacred and profane) in the Tamil film Agraharathil Kazhutai (Donkey in a Brahmin Village, 1977). The Tamil film, which was inspired by Robert Bresson’s French film Au hasard Balthazar (1966), was banned in Tamil Nadu to not upset the Brahmins.
The spiritual reminiscences of Abraham’s donkey to Ghatak’s Neeta are hard to miss — they are sacrificial lambs, mythological scapegoats, victims of their fate. Like the donkey’s ghost — ridiculed in life, worshipped after death — Ghatak is a spectre that haunts Abraham’s film’s narrative, his cinema and his life. The student nonpareil stuck to the credo of the “Ritwik vision”. “John Abraham was really obsessed with Ghatak; his entire thought process was also like Ghatak’s. The things that provoked him were similar to what provoked Ghatak,” says filmmaker Jahnu Barua. Abraham’s poem “A Tribute to Ritwik Ghatak” stands testimony. Both the mentor and his dear student drowned in alcohol and tragically died young, almost around the same age.
Not just arthouse directors, Ghatak found fans among the commercially successful filmmakers too, from Bollywood to Kollywood. Meghe Dhaka Tara inspired the popular and influential Tamil director K Balachander to make his own version Aval Oru Thodar Kathai (She is a never-ending story, 1974).
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By his own admission, cinema was not Ghatak’s first love but the form consumed him. He would always say, “If I find a more powerful medium than cinema, I would plunge into it’,” his late wife Surama Ghatak recounted to film historian Amrit Gangar when he met her in 1990s Calcutta (now Kolkata), Gangar writes in his essay in Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments (2025, Westland Books), a book of essays and reminiscences edited by Shamya Dasgupta. Surama-di said, “He [Ghatak] began with writing short stories. Since theatre was a more powerful medium, he entered the field of theatre. And then cinema, because through films he could reach a greater mass of people.”
Eternal migrants
Anup Singh’s Ekti Nadir Naam (The Name of a River, 2001) — the title, a hat-tip to Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) — is a love story, “as in many of his films. I begin with a man and a woman made homeless by the 1971 Bangladesh’s liberation war. As they cross the river between Bangladesh and India – playing the roles of refugees, divine beings, and characters from his films — with them, the film also tries to understand the earlier partition of India that led to the massacre of half a million people and forced 10 million people to migrate across the newly established borders. The film has many of the main actors from his films, like Supriya Choudhary, Anil Chatterjee, Abanish Bannerjee and Gita Dey. While it is also shot on many of the locations where he shot his films and the songs and music of his films are echoed, ‘Ekti Nadir Naam’ uses his imagistic, aural and story elements to wander through the history of nations, India and Bangladesh, his life and the significance of his cinema even today for so many young filmmakers,” he says.
‘Qissa’ director Anup Singh. (Courtesy the filmmaker)
It took Tanzania-born Indian and FTII, Pune graduate Anup Singh 10 years to make his first feature Ekti Nadir Naam (2001), produced by NFDC, India, BFI, UK, & Bangladesh. Through the shoot schedule in Bangladesh, he’d alternate between shooting the film and recovering at the hospital from a raging gastroenteritis attack. His liver was damaged, the doctors believed he was an alcoholic. But he didn’t drink. His colleagues teased him that Ghatak’s ghost was testing him — to see if he was stubborn enough to complete the film. Soon, the UK and Indian production units shut shop.
“Ekti Nadir Naam is a young filmmaker’s homage and a passionate endeavour at a dialogue with his teacher’s cinema. My second film, Qissa (2014, starring Irrfan Khan), began from Ritwikda’s understanding of the Partition of India. And The Song of Scorpions (2018), my third film, was an attempt to study the brutalising patterns of patriarchy that prevail even within a love relationship,” he adds.
Singh was “distressed and unnerved” by Ghatak’s film when he first encountered them. The “shape of the composition and the miniscule inflections of his shots kept disrupting the plot and summoning multiple themes: partition of a nation, severance of people, recurrence of ritualistic sacrifice of women, the life-defining patterns of history, myth and nature, tearing at and questioning each other,” he says, “Here was a cinema of home and homelessness, of Partition, which led my forefathers to foreign lands. Ritwik-da’s disquieting question in Jukti, Takko aar Gappo, “Who is not a refugee?” echoed as his most affirmative statement. And the ‘Charaiveti, charaiveti’ call to keep moving. To wander on…to celebrate the affirmation of life that was ablaze in his cinema.”
Ghost of Ghatak lives on at FTII
In 1971, Jahnu Barua was part of the “lucky batch” that met Ghatak for just a day when the latter had come to conduct a workshop. Ketan Mehta was also present in class. Barua recalls how he’d refer to Ingmar Bergman as “knave” and would reserve his conspicuous irritation — and choicest Bengali cuss words for students — at his own inability to make them understand theory, cinematic vision and passion. “Ghatak is a feeling for everyone. Without him no class is complete at FTII. I had no idea who he was before I went to the institute, where I could feel that everyone was talking about him, there was some kind of air about him on the campus; every film we saw, the senior students would talk about him, not just as a filmmaker but also in terms of cinematic passion. I saw the first film that he’d made, but which remained unreleased until his death, Nagarik (1952), and a documentary made for the students, Rendezvous, I was totally stunned by the visual experience. Such powerful images he had created. I got drawn into those images,” he says.
A sketch of Ghatak on a wall of FTII, Pune. (Courtesy Shamya Dasgupta and Westland Books)
The last scene of Meghe Dhaka Tara, when Neeta says “dada, aami banchte chai” (brother, I want to live!) “chokes” Barua every time he watches it. Years later when he was making his own films, his master’s images came to Barua, “For my films Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai (Catastrophe, 1987) and Xagoroloi Bohudoor (It’s a Long Way to the Sea, 1995), the idea of using images (village life, trees, rivers, memories of childhood) to lift a film came from him,” he adds.
Filmmaker Jahnu Barua. (Courtesy the filmmaker)
Sudhir Mishra was drawn to the radical rebel of a director, to “the whole impact of his work, basically its tenseness and emotional depth,” he says, adding, “[Ghatak] is not afraid. That fearlessness goes to its logical extent [in his work], taking everything in an emotional way while simultaneously seeing its objective truth in a political context. Of how politics of the outside world and manipulation of power brokers trample over innocent individual lives. He tells that with great humanity and lyricism. The savage and lyrical exist together. And it is very difficult to capture that. I see his work not in order to get inspired but in order to learn and experience it and go back into that world.”
Politics of cinema
Barua calls Ghatak a “super-creator”. “He has been a strong humanist because of the kind of trauma he had gone through, with the experiences during his early years, witnessing Bengal famine, Partition, partition of Bengal, human displacement…his childhood made a lot of impact on him. He had a creatively powerful youth…he started creating plays, was involved in IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), I felt he got more confined to those aspects…he was influenced by Leftism. The political aspects didn’t let the filmmaker go out of that limitation. But I don’t call him a Leftist. I call him a humanist,” he adds.
Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra. (Courtesy the filmmaker)
Mishra, who has written a long article on Ghatak for the centenary celebrations at Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF, November 6-13), begs to differ. “It’s like saying ‘my wife’s beautiful but I can’t love her because she has cancer,” he says, “[Ghatak] is indistinguishable from the politics, from the partition of Bengal, how folks were divided, displaced, left adrift and abandoned…that abandonment breaks his heart. I don’t see him as an ideologue, I think sometimes he mocks the absolute theoretical people. I don’t think you can take [politics] away…everything together makes who he is.”
Because Ghatak the iconoclast challenged the social norms of his time and questioned the power structures that a Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Ketan Mehta could do so, too, in their films — which are imbued with Ghatak influences, from dramatic narrative intensity to social consciousness.
Actress Madhabi Mukherjee with actor Bijon Bhattacharya (centre) and Ritwik Ghatak (extreme right) on the sets of ‘Subarnarekha’ (1965) in an archival image. (Courtesy: S.M.M Ausaja Archive)
The late communist Safdar Hashmi, theatre group Jana Natya Manch (JANAM) co-founder, believed “Indian cinema didn’t have a language before Ritwik Ghatak”. Hashmi wrote [as reprinted in The Unmechanical book], “Ritwik and Calcutta were inseparable, and by the early 1970s, both had aged beyond recognition. Calcutta had seen the food movement of 1966, the first United Front government of 1967, the CPI(M)-Naxalite clashes, the rigged elections of 1972. By the mid-’70s, that Calcutta was gasping, and Ritwik’s pulse too ran high with the city’s.”
Ahead of his time
Barua says, “I was bowled over by Ajantrik (1958) for different reasons. It’s not a technically great film — being a film student of the institute, we are very much conscious about technicalities — but you forget technicalities because of its concepts (a car is the film’s protagonist), the humanisation of machines, feeling empathy for machines, identifying yourself, your life’s journey with it; it is more applicable today because everyone is becoming machines.”
Kali Banerjee in a still from ‘Ajantrik’ (1958). (IMDB)
Ajantrik, Ghatak’s first commercial film, captures a transition: from a sentimental pre-modern attachment to objects to a replacing-old-with-new capitalist reality. He anthropomorphises the machine (Jagaddal, a 1920s Chevrolet jalopy), wresting it from the idea of an alien monstrosity to a companion to Bimal (Kali Banerjee). The Oraon tribespeople of Jharkhand present a contrast to Bimal and city life. Documentary filmmaker Meghnath revisited the places where Ghatak’s film was shot in to make In Search of Ajantrik (2024). “My documentary is to understand why Ghatak made the film in 1957, how he saw cinema, what role his film played in developing cinema, his sincerity in doing things, and how he saw the Adivasi community,” he says.
An internalised gaze
The Adivasi, or the marginalised, is a subject filmmaker Devashish Makhija (Joram, Bhonsle, Ajji) keeps returning to in spirit. “I self-appointed Ghatak as my lighthouse when I chose to make films about the socially under-represented — a set I don’t belong to,” he says, “and I live with constant guilt about appropriating their narratives. In my humble opinion, Ghatak had gotten the non-privileged ‘gaze’ right (decades before it became imperative to wrangle with these things). Something most of his peers didn’t. He saw the subjects of his films from the inside out. It helped that he had lived through similar preoccupations and pain.”
The Sindhi filmmaker, who grew up in Calcutta and made Mumbai his home, found in Ghatak’s films a “vindication for the aesthetics of suffering (as opposed to ‘poverty porn’).” Makhija says, “His camera did not shy away from the tearing slipper, the rancid wound, the itchy unshaved beard. He used his cinema to question why we compel ourselves to come to terms with displacement, inequality, suffering, bigotry. I turn to him when I feel the weight of these questions in my cinema start to crush me. And he tells me to make my cinema only if I’m okay with it eventually killing me. I’m still grappling with that.” Makhija had written an unfinished, unreleased film, Bhoomi, which had nods to Jukti Takko Aar Goppo (1977).
On home turf
One half of those who have watched Abhinandan Banerjee’s Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man, 2021), find spiritual links to Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) — the story of an underdog who doesn’t belong anywhere, the cloud is a harbinger of freedom and hope for him. The other half references Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, for Manik was Ray’s daak naam (nickname). “The black and white imagery, the wide shots and negative space in my film will remind of the frames of Meghe Dhaka Tara and Titash Ekti Nodir Naam, they are full of negative space,” says Banerjee.
For him, Bengali cinema began with Ghatak, introduced to his films by his grandfather in small-town Bengal. “The first Ghatak VCD I saw was Jukti Takko aar Goppo and it blew my mind, the character Ghatak played, the world he created, is full of realism and very different from his other films. I have never seen a film like that till now,” he says. As a child, he didn’t like Ghatak’s melodrama (underlined moments in Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha) because he didn’t understand it.
Ghatak was a rupture to orthodox cinema-making in Bengal. Ghatak is more personal to Banerjee than a Ray or Mrinal Sen, he says, “he is his own universe and he is a mad guy…like a Professor Shonku of cinema, where you can’t put a language to him – not Hollywood, not neo-realism, not French wave. You don’t see any influence, you see an emotional man who got hurt by the ideas and themes of freedom, tragedy, humanism and who loved theatre. When you can’t define a form of art after experiencing it and what an artist is trying to do to you, you just feel, that intangible, complex feeling is only possible with Ghatak. Ray and Sen make you think more than anything but Ghatak makes you feel. That’s the major differentiator for me. I can’t compare Ghatak to a world cinema auteur and that’s why I love him. I am proud that we also have someone whom you can’t frame.”
If there’s one word he’d choose to define Ghatak, it is “audacity” – “what I aimed for when writing my film,” he says, “From him, I’ve learnt, cinema doesn’t need cinema, cinema needs life. I’m blown away by his (unfinished) documentary on artist Ramkinkar Baij that observes the free spirit personality that just doesn’t care. Ghatak, Vincent van Gogh, Ramkinkar Baij and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay – they were the actual audacious humans who lived like kings [of their domain], true artists who never gave a damn to the world, and died early. We are urban hypocrites.”
Among his contemporaries, Banerjee finds echoes of Ghatak’s free-spirit storytelling and characterisation style in Goutam Ghose’s son Ishaan Ghose’s films (Jhilli, Morichika), in which “life and spirit organically blossom,” he says. Ishaan, however, is honest in admitting to the crime of not having watched Ghatak’s films but has heard wonderful stories of the maverick auteur from his filmmaker father, who was close to the Ghataks.
Music to our ears
Mishra says, a lot of people think that Ghatak didn’t like Rabindranath Tagore for instance (unlike Ray), but if one sees the use of Tagore in Ghatak’s works, one realises that Rabindrasangeet, Hindustani classical and folk songs — all co-exist. Singh says, “Image, sound, music, and even songs emerge with the force of questions, challenging all pre-determining beliefs or doctrines…What Ritwik-da was working with, I slowly began to see with awe and wonder, were the principles of music. This is what many of us seek to follow and celebrate in our films, and call it the epic form.”
Supriya Choudhury in a still from ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ (1960). (Courtesy: S.M.M Ausaja Archive)
His use of songs is beautiful, says Mishra, whose own films (Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi) are remembered for their music. “The way he uses, for example, even in Meghe Dhaka Tara, when the sister comes and the brother sings, almost summons him like an alaap, the way they meet; and the way he uses Je raate… (Subarnarekha) which is a mournful song, but he uses it in an almost romantic manner. He’s quite a guy,” he concludes.
