Opinion At 100, Ritwik Ghatak is so contemporary

On February 7, 1976, the day Ritwik Ghatak died, Calcutta saw a spontaneous outpouring of grief. Thousands of people thronged the streets and accompanied the funeral procession, paying homage to the director who had died at 51 of tuberculosis. “It was a unique funeral of a unique man,” wrote Safdar Hashmi in his 1981 essay, ‘The Genius That Was Ritwik Ghatak’. Yet, the profound public mourning stood in sharp contrast to the neglect Ghatak endured in his lifetime. Despite being one of the pioneers of India’s New Wave cinema, he had not received the kind of recognition his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen enjoyed. His first film, Nagarik, would release only after his death. Several others, including Titas Ekti Nadir Naam, would run into difficulties.

If Ghatak’s lifetime was marked by failure, the failure was heroic. He was perpetually at odds with the system — political, cinematic, commercial — that demanded compliance. His films often misunderstood, his politics unfashionable — he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1955 — his temperament uncompromising, he continued nonetheless to produce devastatingly beautiful films, such as his Partition trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), and nurtured a generation of filmmakers such as Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and Adoor Gopalakrishnan during his stint as a teacher at Pune’s FTII. Ghatak saw cinema as a social act that was both deeply local and radically universal, a form of collective memory-making, as ritual and protest, as the world seemed to crumble all around him.

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A century later, in a fractured world, his voice feels startlingly contemporary. It’s a reminder that failure can be fertile, and that art, when it refuses to compromise, can be counted upon to bear witness.