About 50 years ago, Indian cinema changed fundamentally. The first Bombay International Film Festival showed a selection of Italian neo-realist films and the effect was immediate. The dominant musical and mythical aesthetics of Hindi cinema was knocked off course. Within two years, Bimal Roy's Two Measures of Land was released and the history of Indian realist cinema had begun.
No national cinema at the time, not even vanquished Germany's, needed to turn its face towards reality more than India's. The trauma of partition had taken place just a few years before, as had the assassination of Gandhi; landlord exploitation was rife; the caste system was clashing with the modernising politics of the new Indian government. The art of place, cinema, had work to do.
The seed planted by the Italian screenings in 1951 thrived particularly in Bengal, on the opposite side of the country to Bombay, where the problems were most acute. The film society movement of the 1940s had prepared the ground and the west Bengal state government lent initial support to filmmakers but, within a few years and a few hundred miles of Calcutta, the founding father of modern Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray, emerged. His Pather Panchali was the toast of Cannes in 1955 and his subsequent films were distributed around the world. He was to western taste. His approach was novelletish, psychological, realist, measured. He was Strindberg behind the camera.
In the rush to discover and acclaim Ray, a fellow Bengali was overlooked. Where Ray graced the festival circuit, the other filmmaker grumbled at home. He left work unfinished, bartered film rights for booze, hated his producers, raged against the partition of his beloved Bengal and spent time in a sanitarium. Temperamentally, he was the Sam Peckinpah of Indian cinema. Aesthetically and politically, he was its Pasolini. Satyajit Ray himself called him one of the greatest Indians to handle a camera. His name was Ritwik Ghatak.
Ghatak was born in Dhaka, 100 miles east of Calcutta, in 1925. He ran away from home at 14 and became involved with politics in 1943 and, later, in the Indian People's Theatre Association. He translated Brecht into Bengali. His brother, who had worked on English documentaries in the 1930s, introduced him to filmmakers. Ghatak liked the reach of this new medium and, in Eisenstein and the Soviets, found a radical film language which he made his own.
Then came partition, the explicit or implicit theme of most of his nine features. The loose trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Kamal Goudhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1965), portray it as a wretched, impoverishing event and are among the most expressive Indian documents of partition's effects. In the first, a woman called Nita sacrifices her life to rebuild her family, which has been shattered by national events. At the end of the third, the main character, Sita, cuts her throat. Ghatak said that they pictured a "deceived age," India's "original sin." In his view, the Muslim League and the Congress Party had torn the country apart by accepting "a destructive independence."
I recently saw these three films again at the Mumbai (Bombay) Film Festival, half a century after Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves was first shown here. They are fresh and vivid, at least as good as anything by Ray. Meghe Dhaka Tara is a masterpiece.
Now Ghatak is all the rage. Cornell University held a tribute to him, so did the New York Film Festival. UCLA did a retrospective, as did Ahmedabad and the Cinematheque Ontario. Rows and Rows of Fences, the first Ghatak monograph in English, appeared last year.
So why such a flurry of interest and why now? There's a rush to revise the evaluation of Ray in the 1950s and a muted mea culpa from those who found him more palatable; there's the glamour of the self-destructive alcoholic whose schizophrenia mirrored that of Bengal; and there's the life cut short (Ghatak died at 51). One US critic at the time of the New York screenings wrote that in the 1960s Ghatak's rage embarrassed Indians and westerners determined to pretend that partition had worked. Televised "partitions" and ethnic cleansings in the 1990s, the same writer argued, have made Ghatak relevant again.
Perhaps. My own view is that Ghatak has made a comeback because his filmmaking isn't lazy. You can imagine him drunk and growling in the edit suite, like Peckinpah or Welles, working through the night. His choice of lenses, especially in his final film, the autobiographical Yukti Takko Ar Gappo in which Ghatak himself plays an alcoholic intellectual, is as experimental as a work by Godard, a filmmaker who is also back ? la mode. Certainly, seeing Ghatak films now in wretched Bombay, his rage seems appropriate to the problems.
Ritwik Ghatak died in 1976, during Indira Gandhi's state of emergency. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, during which almost 1m people died, was too much for him. India's first political filmmaker drank permanently thereafter. He always insisted that cinema wasn't an art, yet produced some of the greatest of it.
