Interview: ‘Ritwik Ghatak was far ahead of his time, addressing issues that remain very real today’

Relatives, friends, collaborators, filmmakers, admirers, scholars and Ritwik Ghatak himself. An engrossing anthology of 50 essays released to celebrate the Bengali iconoclast’s birth centenary on November 4 thrums with voices and views, a bit like the title of Ghatak’s final film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Reason, Debate and a Story) in 1974.

Unmechanical – Ritwik Ghatak In 50 Fragments (Westland Books), edited by Shamya Dasgupta, has new articles, archival writings, interviews, rare photographs, poems and illustrations inspired by Ghatak’s movies.

One section features Ghatak’s views on cinema and art. In an interview from the 1960s, Ghatak spoke of why he made films: “For the people. What else is there but people? The last word in all art is the people.”

Ghatak died in 1976, at the age of 50. He directed eight features and several documentaries and shorts. There were unfinished features too – the unrealised dreams of a communist maverick whose life was marked by frenetic intellectual activity, domestic turmoil, alcoholism and the lingering trauma of the partition of Bengal in 1947.

Ghatak’s films, including Ajantrik (1958), Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) Subarnarekha (1965) and Titas Ektir Nadir Naam (1973), were not properly understood in their time or accorded the acclaim they enjoy today. Yet, Ghatak’s legacy has endured through admirers of his epic tales of dispossession, ideological ferment and the...

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