Ritwik ghatak biography of mahatma

My interests, personal as well as professional, are in politics and society; in cultural terms I am more-or-less a philistine. I know a little about literature, a little less about music, and nothing at all about the greatest of modern art forms, the cinema. This column about a film director is being written by a man who has never seen any of his films. My excuse is that I am writing not about Ritwik Ghatak the film-maker but about Ritwik Ghatak the man, and about his relations with his Government in particular. What I report here is based on what I found in recently declassified archives dealing with the Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi. I was studying the years 1970 and 1971—looking for correspondence on the Bangladesh crisis, I instead came across some papers on the mighty Government of India’s dealings with a maverick film-maker from Bengal.
On Republic Day, 1970, it was announced that the President of India had conferred the Padma Shri on Ritwik Ghatak. A few days later, a group of Opposition M. P.’s tabled a starred question in the Lok Sabha demanding that the Minister of Home Affairs answer the following:

‘(a) Whether it is a fact that Shri Ritwik Ghatak, who slandered Mahatmaji as an “offspring of a pig from beginning to end” and abused other national leaders, has been given the award of “Padma Shri” on the Republic Day, 1970;
(b) If so, the reasons for giving this award in the Gandhi Centenary Year;
(c) Who recommended his name?
(d) Whether this honour conferred on Shri Ghatak will be taken back:
(e) If not, the reasons therefore?’

The MP’s challenge was taken up by two of India’s most clear-headed civil servants. These were the Home Secretary, L. P. Singh, and the Secretary to the Prime Minister, P. N. Haksar. They found that in March 1969, Ritwik Ghatak had indeed made some very critical remarks about Gandhi. These were published in a journal brought out by a group of (possibly Naxalite) students at

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For the historical formulation of categories like "global art cinema" or "world cinema" rests upon certain premises which determine how cultural texts outside Euro-American frameworks are read. 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." 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." The former becomes a global citizen, India's contribution to a global cinematic modernism, because he is first read as such. The history of Ghatak's reception in the West, both a prolonged deferral and a cycle of discoveries and rediscoveries, underscores the temporal asymmetries implicit in such notions of global art, which always presumes a legibility that originates within European contexts.

If Ray's Pather Panchali alerted the Western world to the emergence of a modernist idiom within Indian national cinema, 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) to establishing, and securing, a domicile under industrialized modernity in the metropolis of Calcutta. This politics (and poetics) of uplift is crystallized in one of the most rapturous scenes in the history of cinema: a nearfantastical vision Apu experiences as a child when, playing in a field of kaash flowers with his elder sister D

AT A CRITICAL POINT in Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), the Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s best-known and most commercially successful work, the aged patriarch of the family at the center of the film turns directly toward the screen and, in a moment of unexpected theatricality, shouts, “I accuse…!” The force of these words, hurled (in English, breaking from the film’s vernacular Bengali) at the audience and punctuated by the speaker’s gesticulations and a pointed finger, is almost immediately blunted when his son retorts: “Whom?” The old man despondently lowers his finger and mutters, “Nobody.” It is highly unlikely that Ghatak was unaware of the historical resonances of the J’accuse at the heart of Meghe Dhaka Tara. However, where Zola’s famous cry elicited fierce responses both celebratory and condemnatory, Ghatak’s politics of despair imagined a fate worse than either: how does one adjudicate blame and point the finger when there is no singular figure to embody the crime?

Born on November 4, 1925, in Dhaka (East Bengal, present-day Bangladesh) to an upper-middle-class family, Ritwik Ghatak received an education and came of age as a refugee in the colonial Calcutta, India, of the 1940s. He experienced firsthand the successive migrant and refugee crises resulting from the British-engineered famines of 1943, which directly caused approximately three million deaths and led to generation-spanning conditions of catastrophic poverty; widespread social upheavals due to World War II; followed by massive violence along communal lines during the Partition of India in 1947, when, as part of Britain’s relinquishment of control over India, the nation was carved up into India and Pakistan, while the province of Bengal wa

[On March 7, 2020, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted a film screening of Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha (1962) by visiting scholar Moinak Biswas (Film Studies, Jadavpur University). Below is a response by Susmita Das (Institute of Communications Research).] Thinking (and Teaching) History through Film Form Written by Susmita Das (Institute of Communications Research) As we settled into our seats in the Armory theater, the movie was paused on the film’s certificate of exhibition. Subarnarekha or Suvarna Rekha was released as an “A” film in 1962, meaning the film was intended for Adult audiences. But what mature content could a Bengali film set against the Partition contain? I wondered. [caption id="attachment_2090" align="alignnone" width="899"] Image taken by the author at the film screening[/caption] “This is one of the most violent films that people had seen in Indian cinema,” Prof. Moinak Biswas began. [caption id="attachment_2093" align="align-left" width="238"]Image of Ritwik Ghatak[/caption] Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), the director of Subarnarekha, was a visionary of Bengali and Indian cinema whose films responded to the Partition of India in 1947 through a trilogy of which Subarnarekha was the third and final part. Ghatak’s films were misunderstood by film critics and attacked for “professing despair” at a time when his leftist contemporaries believed that a socialist utopia was right there (as Prof. Biswas explained in his lecture the next day). Ghatak responded to his critics in 1966 with two essays in Bengali. In these essays (translated into English by Prof. Biswas), Ghatak not only mourns his critics’ gross misinterpretation of Subarnarekha’s message, but also the death of film criticism:

“There was not the slightest intention in my mind to profess ‘despair.’ I have tried