Ritwik Ghatak, the lone voice

Ghatak’s films were an artist’s rebellious, painful, naked howl that cuts through the entire façade of so called decorative and bourgeois art; screaming with a brave and indifferent ‘I deny’.


Creativity, more than the art-form, is concerned with ideas and thoughts; the medium or the art-form doing as much as to ‘support’ the expression. The greatest of the artists (Kafka being a notable example) were almost always spontaneous, where the creative ideas/ inspirations have literally ‘exploded’ out, without any ‘dressing’. Great works of art (like Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’), are in many cases incomplete, yet bursting with inspiration and intensity.

Like Dostoevsky, Ritwik Ghatak too lived his thoughts and ideas in his personal life; suffering not only theoretically, but also physically, from acute alcoholism, alienation, isolation, etc. As Shahani (one of his prized pupil) had once explained, Ritwik Ghatak was “disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement.” A curious parallel can be drawn from the characters in his films: when they smoke (which is mostly ‘bidi’), they smoke with a tremendous intensity and hatred, in stark contrast to Ray’s characters (smoking cigarettes) who smoke elegantly, intellectually. This is not to speak anything against Ray’s work in any way. Ray is and will always remain one of the greatest directors that world cinema has ever produced.

Ghatak, like Joyce (or Ginsberg) in literature, had created his own style (like usage of sound alongwith deep-focus to create different layers of background) in order to express himself. His style was tailored to express ideas, problems, and issues deeply rooted in the epoch in which he lived; and yet, transcending beyond boundaries and epochs. Capturing Bengal in the 50s to 70s, his films revolved around themes of partition, alienation, existential struggle, always seen from an individual’s view-point, never impersonal. The artist’s spontaneity, pain and empathy were always visible.

Ghatak consciously held out against succumbing to the upper-middle class Bengali audience (often called the ‘intelligentsia’), who were far removed from ground-level problems like famine and partition. As a result, Ghatak could never reach upto their cozy, fashionable drawing rooms (like the bust of Goethe described in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf). His films spoke with a self-consuming intensity which never gave any comfort to the audience. Only those ready to face it with all its stark cruelty were welcome to his myriad world. This lack of ‘feel-good’ factor was a key reason for his limited appeal in India and the West (there were other reasons though, like planned sabotage by political establishments). He himself once said – “I do not believe in 'entertainment' as they say it or slogan mongering. Rather, I believe in thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, my country and finally my own people. I make films for them. I may be a failure. That is for the people to judge.”

As Ghatak is being rediscovered these days, as generations to come will wonder at his films, as his films will continue to speak across the boundaries which had systematically tried to finish him off, a dark question will again and again come to haunt us - ‘Are we too, not responsible?’

- Siddhartha Banerjee, http://passionforcinema.com/ritwik-ghatak-the-lone-voice/