Ritwik Ghatak

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Ritwik Ghatak was perhaps one of the few filmmakers who worked without any overt influences from any predecessor. He was an completely original auteur in Indian cinema. Always dogged by back luck, whimsical ways and alcoholism, he could never achieve the iconic stature that Satyajit Ray did. Though many aver, that he was as great a film maker as Satyajit Ray , success always eluded him. In Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen’s account of Ritwik Ghatak’s place in the history of Indian cinema, they propose Ritwik Ghatak was truly an original filmmaker with no cinematic predecessors. Rather, they suggest that “aesthetically his work can be placed alongside that of Bengali novelist Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–56) and the teachings of his music forbear Ustad Allauddin Khan”. Given this assessment, it is not surprising that some of the most intriguing comments made by one of India’s most well respected independent directors are about cinema itself. What is surprising is that Ghatak’s writings about the cinema regularly denounce a love for the medium. Instead, Ritwik Ghatak drew a fine distinction between the opportunities offered up by the cinema and cinema itself, always insisting: “Film is not a form, it has forms”. Accordingly, it was the massive size of the film going audience, rather than a love for the cinema, that Ritwik Ghatak claims brought him to the business of films. The only special skill he perceived in the cinema over any other artistic medium was that “It can reach millions of people at one go, which no other medium is capable of” . Ritwik Ghatak declared on a number of occasions that if some other medium came along enabling him to reach more of the masses, he would happily drop cinema and embrace that other medium. His first film Nagarik was mired in controversy and released only posthumously. Ritwik Ghatak belonged to erstwhile East Pakistan and had faced the ravages of partition, memories of which lingered in his mind and reflected in his films till his untimely death. His second film Ajantrik was about a relationship between a man and his taxi. It was eccentric in style and content and hence unrelatable to the the cinema going public. It had sparks of brilliance and though jagged in style had great command over form. His next film Bari Theke Paliye was a children’s film about how a young boy runs away from home and faces many adventures. This too did nothing much at the box office.