Ritwik Ghatak was a film and theatre professional whose first acting role was in a 1950 film which did well in the Soviet Union. This was the period when the Left realized it had to capture the Hindu refugee vote in Bengal otherwise they would support the Jan Sangh. They were very successful in this strategy which suited Congress- the other party responsible for the horrible plight of the refugees.
Ghatak's first film was completed two years later in 1952- 3 years before Ray's first film- but was only released after his death. He also worked as a scriptwriter on 'Madhumati'- a big hit- in Mumbai. By contrast, Satyajit Ray worked in advertising and developed a passion for avant garde Western Cinema. He financed his first film with his own savings and that of his friends and relatives. The C.M of West Bengal also gave him some money from the Highway budget because Ray's film had 'Path' in the title.
Ray's film went down well in the West because his cinematic grammar was Western. The truth is Bengal has very talented crafts-people- cinematographers, lighting people, etc. I suppose a lot of them ended up in Mumbai.
Ritwik had been part of the Communist theatre movement which had to adapt to Indian conditions to retain an audience. They were particularly good at song-writing. He himself suffered from a fractured and fractious 'anima' (Ritwik was a Jungian) such that the three aspects of the Mother Goddess were at war. In his best movie, the heroine, representing Saraswati is doomed because her mother, fierce Durga or Kali, prefers to marry off her swain to the other daughter (Laxmi) simply because the family needs the heroine's meagre earning to survive. Ritwik could have made good melodramas, provided there was some human interest angle to the plot, which would have been marketable or, at the very least, which Bollywood could have remade for a bigger audience. It is doubtful if Ray could ever have made anything which appealed to the Indian masses or, indeed, classes. But Ray wasn't a Communist. He was perfectly comfortable with a haut bourgeois status. His films broke even and their international release was profitable. Ray was an auteur like Woody Allen- he loved Cinema but his later films were narcissistic, if not virtue signaling, shite whose touches of virtuosity were ultimately meretricious. The difference between Allen and Ray was that Allen was making films about successful people in places that mattered. Calcutta, however, had ceased to matter even to Indians. 'Apu' in the Simpsons represents Ray's Cinematic legacy. But Apu has a Peter Sellers accent.
Ghatak was an alcoholic who passed away in 1976 at the age of 50. He was well respected in India- he had served as the Vice Principal of the Film institute in Pune- but was considered a difficult man to work with. Ray's reputation in India peaked around the time Ritwik died. Shatranj ke Khilari came out when Sanjeev Kumar was a big star. Amitabh Bacchan provided the narration. Bacchan had been bitten by the acting bug when working as a Business Executive in Calcutta but it was Mumbai that he had to migrate so as to rise in the movies- initially by playing a Bengali Doctor in 'Anand' which was directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. By comparison, Ray's only Hindi movie was as boring as shit- but surely that was Premchand's point? Be boring. You owe it to Mahatma Gandhi if not Kali Marx.
Ray's reputation declined thereafter. David Lean and Richard Attenborough made successful movies about India. Victor Bannerjee shone in 'Passage' but even he bombed in 'Ghare Bhaire'. The bigotry of the buddhijiv- the belief that anything commercial was evil- made both Ray, the talented hobbyist, and Ritwik, the programmatic professional with flashes of genius, deeply boring and stupid. They advertised a product which they could not themselves provide because they disdained their own milieu but could represent no other because they knew no other. But that knowledge was shallow because they didn't bother with 'market research'. Commercial cinema has to be on the qui vive regarding public tastes and trends.
Swagato Chakravorty writes in the LA review of books
the historical formulation of categories like “global art cinema” or “world cinema” rests upon
a niche market. There would have been Film festivals in any case so that different countries could learn new techniques or adapt novel plots or (in the case of Hollywood) spot and recruit talent. However 'world cinema' as a category catered to a Left- Liberal or pseudo-intellectual market. Nevertheless some film-makers or stars could cross over to the mainstream.
Cinema is a highly entrepreneurial commercial activity. Its categories arise for purely economic reasons.
Swagato, whose PhD is from Yale, takes a different view. Reality is actually determined by ideas in the heads of philosophers. Those ideas have
certain premises which determine how cultural texts outside Euro-American frameworks are read.
This is certainly true of cultural texts like Japanese tentacle porn. The premise is that octopuses are good at pleasing pussies.
One such premise, as the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty influentially argued in Provincializing Europe (2000), is historicism — which “made modernity or capitalism look not simply not global but rather […] something that became global over time, by originating in one place [Europe] and then spreading outside it.”.
Modernity originated in America. Europe was playing catch up. India did not became 'modern' under the Raj. The place was overrun with be-jeweled Maharajas and half naked Mahatmas.
This logic of deferral translates historical time into “a measure of cultural distance,” securing for Euro-American cultural institutions the conditions for admitting a Ray but denying a Ghatak, saying “not yet.”
This is foolish. Both started off making at least one watchable movie. Ray's movies were marketed abroad because Indian foreign policy consisted of passing around the begging bowl. Ghatak's case was different. Since both Congress and the Communists could be blamed for Partition and the plight of the refugees, both ganged up to ensure that Komal Gandharv was a flop. Partha Chatterjee wrote-
The knowledge that Komal Gandhar‘s box-office potential was sabotaged by people who were once his friends, deeply hurt Ghatak. It is to this day widely believed in Calcutta that the Communists and Congress joined hands to finish him off. A large number of tickets were bought by goons of both the parties who then disturbed the viewing of the legitimate viewer by sobbing loudly during funny scenes and breaking into uproarious laughter at the serious ones. The audience was alienated and the viewer-ship fell dramatically after a promising run in the first week. The film had to be withdrawn. He, being the co-producer, had to share the burden of the financial loss. It broke him. His descent into alcohol began soon after
Ray doubled down on being a bigger bore than Tagore. Ritwik's personal life was soon as miserabilist as his oeuvre. The two fused into one in his last film. By then, Calcutta had acquired the reputation of being the arsehole of the Turd World. It was obvious that the place had turned to shit after the departure of the Brits. What was the point of watching a movie by a Bengali which admonished Bengalis to stop being so shitty when, it was obvious, every Bengali was already admonishing every other Bengali in precisely the same manner with the result that the place had turned to shit?
The former becomes a global citizen,
Ray could have directed a film based on an original story of his for Columbia. His talent was of a type Hollywood could understand. After all, the bloke had worked in advertising- including a stint in London. His knowledge of American and European cinema was encyclopedic. Ghatak's 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' was good but its idiom was Indian. However, not even Indians- like this Swagato dude- get the Jungian angle even though Ghatak explained it.
India’s contribution to a global cinematic modernism, because he is first read as such.
I think early Ray was read as 'Humanistic'- this was important during the Cold War. He could be the cinematic equivalent of Pearl Buck. Alternatively, he might turn totes Hollywood and start making films with titles like 'Tarzan vs King Kong'.
The history of Ghatak’s reception in the West, both a prolonged deferral and a cycle of discoveries and rediscoveries,
Not really. Lefties tried to build him up but the message of his films was that Marxism can maybe polish up the Turd World a little but the place would remain a shithole.
underscores the temporal asymmetries
This nutter thinks Time in America flows in a nicer way than back home. That's a good reason for emigrating. Incidentally, premature ejaculation is an example of temporal asymmetry.
implicit in such notions of global art, which always presumes a legibility that originates within European contexts.
No. Japan's Samurai films influenced Hollywood. Hong Kong's Kung Fu films totally changed fight choreography. When I was a kid, big fat men would trade punches. Now it is very slim girls who jump into the air and kick the shit out of each other.
If Ray’s Pather Panchali alerted the Western world to the emergence of a modernist idiom within Indian national cinema,
This is nonsense. The handful of people who knew Ray also knew that most Indian movies had lots of songs and dances and fights and villains in dark glasses. The problem was that Westerners didn't like our music and the fight scenes weren't very good. Also the movies were just too damn long.
Indian film was 'modernist' long before Ray. Dungan- the guy who launched M.S Subbalaxmi and Sivaji Ganesan and Karunanidhi's career- was American. In Tamil Nadu, Cinema, in becoming political, took over Politics. In Bengal, such Cinema as became Marxist was deemed unwatchable even by Marxists.
it — and the continuation of Apu’s story in Aparajito/The Unvanquished (1956) and Apur Sansar/Apu’s Household (1959) — also told a story of uplift. Throughout the trilogy, Apu moves from rural poverty (pictured early on as coeval with pre-modern pastoralism)
pastoralism means living off the produce of your cows or goats. Apu grows up in an agricultural, not a pastoral, environment.
to establishing, and securing, a domicile under industrialized modernity in the metropolis of Calcutta.
Very true. He works for a Hedge Fund and drives a Porsche.
This politics (and poetics) of uplift is crystallized in one of the most rapturous scenes in the history of cinema: a near-fantastical vision Apu experiences as a child when, playing in a field of kaash flowers with his elder sister Durga, he sees a train thunder past. Ray films this scene in a way that makes clear the momentous impact this romanticized vision of radical modernity would have on Apu, changing forever the course of his life.
Fuck would he have done if he'd seen a plane? Become Elon Musk and launch his own Space Travel Company?
Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, the first of three films to confront the shocks of Partition, brutally undoes Ray’s romantic visions of modernity just five years later.
Nope. This is a story about a girl- the breadwinner of the family- dying of tuberculosis just when her family's finances turn the corner. She wants to live. Ray's characters can't be greatly bothered either way.
Portraying an impoverished, displaced East Bengali family as they negotiate life in a refugee settlement just outside Calcutta in the 1950s, Ghatak sees trains as exemplifying modernity as a force of personal and cultural alienation.
East Bengali Hindus had to flee the murderous Muslim majority. That's what caused their 'alienation'. Trains weren't the problem. They'll come in handy for Hindus when West Bengal becomes Muslim majority.
In the film, Neeta, the eldest daughter, shoulders the impossible burden of providing for her entire family: her older brother, who dreams of success as a classical singer; her mother who has grown bitter over their reduced circumstances; her father, an absentminded schoolmaster who seems to embody
a belief in Science and Technology. He admires those who do scientific research rather than getting a job with a commercial enterprise. He is very unhappy when his son gets a job in a factory.
the bhadralok humanism that sustains Ray’s Apu trilogy; as well as her younger sister and brother. In one memorable scene, Neeta and her suitor, Sanat, sit under a tree by the river as they discuss their current circumstances and hopes for the future. Abruptly, a train cuts across the frame, its clamor completely obliterating their conversation.
The world is moving on. Sanat will marry the pretty sister after getting a well paid job. Neeta is doomed to an early death. Since Ghatak has no God this is an unrelieved tragedy.
What Swagato doesn't get is that it is rivers, not railways, which are important for Ghatak. Yami that is Yamuna is the Anima. Yama is Death and Social Justice.
The noise caused by the train seems inordinately loud given its distance within the frame,
but we are grateful because the dialogue was boring.
in what is a typically unsettling instance of Ghatak’s audacious play with sound against image, refuting Ray’s seamlessly realist aesthetic and use of synchronous sound. It echoes, with amplified violence, a striking shot in the first moments of the film when Neeta is framed in a tight close-up along the same riverbank,
Because that river is also the Subarnarekha and the Titash. Ghatak got to go back to his ancestral home to make that last film at the invitation of the new Bangladeshi Government. Now East Bengal is prospering under Sheikh Hasina and West Bengal is sinking into hooliganism under Mamta. It is only buddhijivis with dicks who are useless.
listening to her brother practice his singing while a train passes by in the distance. Elsewhere in the film, Neeta’s father has a fateful accident when he breaks his leg in a fall on the train tracks, precipitating a course of events that will see Neeta give up on her education — and indeed gradually give up on living for her own self — as she must attend ever more to her family’s demands.
Railways are bad. They hurt my daddy.
Another startling sequence in Komal Gandhar/E-Flat (1961), the second in the loose “Partition trilogy,” showcases Ghatak’s most uncompromisingly Brechtian commitments, which draw on Ghatak’s own experiences with the Indian People’s Theatre Association.
A Commie outfit which clamored for Partition because of Stalin's 'Nationality' policy.
Their manifestos contained shite like the following-
Some Nationalities in India wanted Hindu Bengalis to fuck off from their territory. Ghatak's family had to run away from their ancestral homes. If the Commies had played up, then- as in Indonesia- Hindus and Muslims would have united to beat them to death. Ritwik may have been given a leg up by the Party but that Party was shit.
The film weaves together a romance with an investigation of the possibilities for artistic and secular collectivity against the backdrop of a nationalist crisis.
The Muslims had kicked out Ghatak's people. Would the Bengalis kick out the Commies? Ultimately, yes. Mamta's goons were better at beating people than the Left Front's goons.
It is also the most forthrightly theatrical of Ghatak’s films — it is worth recalling that Ghatak had extensive experience with the theater, and wrote at length on the relations between theater and cinema.
But Bengal fell behind in Film. Talent went to Mumbai. But, in TN and then Andhra Pradesh, Cinema could do a reverse takeover of Politics. This was because Cinema can do stuff which Theatre can't. It is a dream factory, not shite that puts you to sleep.
Komal Gandhar is deeply informed by the jatra, a rural Bengali theatrical form that
is as boring as shit.
Ghatak once described as “kaleidoscopic, pageant-like, relaxed, discursive.”
and as boring as shit unless it aint relaxed at all and gets to the fucking point with a sharp stab of melodrama
In Komal Gandhar, the protagonist Anusuya is a refugee in Calcutta; she has lost her family in the Partition violence.
They were killed by Muslims.
She pursues her passion for the theater by joining a local performing group, and develops a romantic and creative partnership with its leader, Bhrigu, who like her is also a refugee.
Because he didn't want to stick around and get killed by Muslims.
Through his use of dialect and folk music, histories of Hinduism and Islam, East and West Bengal, Ghatak reconstructs forms of collectivity and kinship, even as the singular catastrophe of a Partition born of centuries of colonial rule looms in the background.
It was born of Islamic invasion.
In the sequence in question, Bhrigu and Anasuya converse by the banks of the river Padma. Bhrigu muses of a time before Partition, recalling the train tracks that used to bring him back from visits to Calcutta to the riverbank, where he would board a steamer to cross over: “I thought of something looking at that track now. It used to be a meeting point, a place of union, and now it has become a point of division. The nation is torn in two there.”
By the Muslim League with Commie backing.
As Bhrigu mourns his displaced status, the film’s formal unity begins to disintegrate. In the background, the sound of women chanting “Dohai Ali”
which is Islamic
(a traditional East Bengali boatmen’s prayer to nature for safe passage) rises sharply in volume. Cutting away from their conversation, the film transforms into one of those “phantom rides” so popular in cinema’s earliest years. The camera takes off down an empty rail track that is cut off in the distance — the India-East Bengal border — and accelerates until, astonishingly, it seems to shatter itself against the wooden barrier.
The Bangladeshis did bring in Ghatak to make a movie for them. I don't think it was released in India.
The sound of the chants, by now loud and frantic, is overwhelmed by what seems like the sound of a whiplash, and the scene cuts to black. If one were to translate into cinematic terms Walter Benjamin’s exegesis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), in which he describes the angel of history fleeing, blown toward the future by a storm called “progress,” from “one single catastrophe” with “his face […] turned toward the past,” one could do no better.
The Hindu refugees from Punjab and Sindh chased out Muslims to make room for themselves. The local Hindus might not have liked this but Punjabis are difficult to argue with. Still, the fact remained, people who are aggressive can be relied on when it comes to mutual defense. We may weep for the weak who are ejected but if they are replaced by the strong, it is in our interest to make common cause with the new comers.
Thus whereas refugees from West Pakistan had an increasingly prosperous future in India many East Bengali Hindus did not. They became a vote bank for the Commies. Will they now become a vote bank for the BJP? No. Mamta's goons will beat the shit out of those who dare challenge Didi's reign of terror.
Bengali Hindus did swamp some North Eastern areas and it may well be that intermarriage and cultural interchange will reduce any tensions that may exist. Say what you like, Bengalis are charming and affectionate people. When not virtue signaling, they are brave and loyal.
Subarnarekha/The Golden Line (1965) concludes Ghatak’s Partition series, in which, once more, he is concerned with questions of caste and refugee crises, displacement, and the impossible absurdities caused by the artificial carving up of territories.
The Muslim League said that the Muslims were a different Nation. The Communists endorsed this claim. Is the author saying Islam and Communism are 'artificial'? That could get him in trouble.
At the film’s center are the siblings Ishwar and Sita. Ishwar adopts Abhiram, an orphan of lower caste, who eventually develops a romance with Sita.
That's incest- adoption or not. Ghatak's films depict the violation of Hindu norms. An adopted brother is still a brother. A father has a duty to marry off his daughter even if she is the breadwinner. Wives are supposed to know the names of their husbands more particularly if they have that husband's baby.
Unable to see past caste lines, Ishwar wants none of it; the couple elope to Calcutta. They marry, but soon afterward Abhiram is killed in an accident. Struggling to support her young child, Sita turns to prostitution.
Which is still better than becoming a Communist theater worker.
In a twist of the knife, her first customer is none other than Ishwar, who has come to the big city for a wild night out (rendered in a spectacular sequence that riffs as much on Edwin Porter’s 1905 Coney Island at Night as on Battleship Potemkin).
It may riff on what it likes. The thing is still shit.
Ishwar fumbles his way into Sita’s room, which is submerged in darkness. He doesn’t have his glasses on (they shattered during the drunken revelries earlier in the night), but Sita, shocked, recognizes him. The lens drifts out of focus. Ambient sound drops out on the soundtrack, and all we hear is her quickened breathing. Before one can regain one’s bearings within this nightmarish space of darkness and blur, Sita seizes a nearby bonti — a kitchen knife found in most Bengali households — and slashes her own throat.
Go thou and do likewise.
The focus continues to drift in and out, as though embodying Ishwar’s struggles to make some sense of what has befallen. He leans over to pick up the bonti, moving with a curious slowness, and then suddenly we are at a distance, watching him move — still with that eerie slowness — across to Sita’s body. The soundtrack is deathly still, until a small, still, male voice speaks: “Hey Ram.” The film scholar Manishita Dass puts it best when she reads this as a citation of Mahatma Gandhi’s reaction to being shot by his Hindu nationalist assassin, Nathuram Godse, thereby “linking Seeta’s death to a national tragedy and the aftermath of Partition.”
Ishwar had gotten a well paid job in the private sector. This was very wicked. He would naturally end up trying to fuck his sister who would slit her own throat as a protest against Capitalism. The moral of Ghatak's movie is don't get well paid jobs with Capitalist enterprises. Also don't visit prostitutes who keep a bonti handy.
At the crux of Ritwik Ghatak’s work, discerned most clearly in the Partition films, is a full-throated protest against the rhetoric of triumphalist Indian nationalism exemplified in Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1947 “Tryst with Destiny” speech, delivered as independent India’s first prime minister after three centuries
less than two centuries. Plassey was 1757 not 1657
of British rule over the Indian subcontinent. Nehruvian nationalism insisted that “the past [is] over and it is the future that beckons to us [now].”
Under Nehru, lots of Muslims were ejected from the country to make room for Hindu refugees. However, in West Bengal the local people preferred their own Muslims to the East Bengali Hindus. However, there was economic migration of Muslims to East Bengal.
It embraced uncritically the European notion of the nation-state construct and viewed nationalist self-determination by the exact standards of European nationalism.
As opposed to what? The Indian notion of lots of Maharajahs and Nawabs and Zamindars and so forth?
Partition, in all its shocking violence, was little more than “the pains of labour,” to be endured, but ultimately left in the past.
Islam is not a European creed. Pakistan was created on the basis of Islam. But forcible conversion and ethnic cleansing of infidels had a long history under Muslim Sultans.
But for Ghatak, it was the loss of subjecthood
His people retained subject-hood- unless Muslims killed them. What they lost was their homes.
experienced by a nation’s people, newly divided along arbitrary lines
Not arbitrary- religious lines.
— a condition imposed as the very criterion of claiming a newly conceived citizenship — that became a recurring obsession.
Only because the guy couldn't be honest with himself. Muslims had driven him out of his ancestral homeland. But Islam has been around for a long time. It has nothing to do with modernity or capitalism.
Rather than try to dramatize all the physical brutality of Partition, Ghatak sought to understand the violence done to human subjecthood and relations by the machinations of the nation-state as it draws, and redraws, lines on a map.
Why is this cretin pretending that the Brits partitioned India, or that it was done in an arbitrary manner? Even if that was the case, why would Ghatak's family have had to leave East Bengal? The answer is that they were being killed there because of their religion.
The specificities that ground Ghatak’s films
were stupid lies
— from matters of Bengal’s history (and the larger history of British colonialism in India),
British colonialism had kept East Bengali Hindus safe. Then the Brits left and the Hindus had to flee.
to subtleties of Bengali social hierarchies;
which not even Bengalis care about. Money talks. Hierarchies can go fuck themselves.
from India’s vast cultural trove of mythology, folklore, and music, to their brilliant, if erratic, allusions to Buñuel, Eisenstein, Brecht, and any number of European figures of the avant-garde — are what make them resistant to easy assimilation into Euro-American canons of global art cinema founded upon historicist ideologies.
Marxism is a historicist ideology. Ghatak was a Marxist. That's why he was promoted so long as there was some human interest to his films.
And this is also where the history of Ghatak’s reception in the West tells a larger story. When notions of world cinema or global art cinema take as their premise the principle that “local” texts must first make themselves legible to an international (read: Euro-American) community, they rehearse the logic of European historicism.
i.e. Marxist shite. By contrast the Japanese 'creature feature' of Hong Kong kung fu film were able to make a market for themselves around the world.
They consign such texts to what Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a lovely turn of phrase, calls the “waiting room of history.”
The rubbish bin of history- maybe. If you make boring films nobody will watch them. If you make films that grip the audience you can turn into a politician- at least in Tamil Nadu.
So long as the terms of what comprises “the global” are inscribed by, within, and for Western institutions, the center remains unshaken and all else is reduced to subalternity.
But 'Western institutions' can't do shit even in the West. If audiences start watching Hong Kong movies, Hollywood has to start producing their own martial arts films. The 'Subaltern Studies' shitheads rushed to get jobs on Western Campuses. But they had no influence on anybody. This guy is now a curator of a Jewish Museum in New York. That pretty much sums up the trajectory of those who gas on about subalternity.
Yet this is not to point an accusatory finger at well-intentioned efforts to globalize canons of cinema.
There is only one canon- make movies people will pay to watch while guzzling popcorn. This generally involves vampires, werewolves or guys who were bitten by a radio-active spider.
Rather, I mean to suggest that the work of Ritwik Ghatak — at once historically precise
history says Muslims chucked Hindus out of East Bengal. Ghatak couldn't admit this.
yet calling out to our contemporary moment of resurgent nationalisms
as opposed to what? Taking it up the arse from oligarchs?
and their attendant crises — as well as its reception in Euro-American cultural contexts, urges us to think carefully about how we negotiate difference as we reconstruct histories of art that were always global anyway.
These guys can't reconstruct shit because they are committed to telling stupid lies. What fucking negotiation will be entrusted to this cretin? Modi and Sheikh Hasina may negotiate things. They have power and are popular. These nutters may have PhDs from fancy skools but they got shit for brains.
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