Remembering Ritwik Ghatak: 32 years after his death

Ritwik Ghatak was once diagnosed as a patient suffering from duel personality.
This was the time when he was frequently been admitted to hospitals as a
result of his relentless drinking and eccentric lifestyle. An utterly shattered
man, he passed away on 6 February 1976 at the age of 51. His admirers recall
that he looked thirty years older than his actual age. They also speak about his
strange nature to ‘allow mean and vicious people to hurt him repeatedly’ and
‘to hurt those who loved him the most and tried to help him’. In his swansong
film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo made in 1974, Ritwik in a honest way tried to
portrait himself through the protagonist Neelkantha Bagchi, the name
suggesting the Hindu god Shiva, who according to Hindu legend had acquired
the name ‘neelkantha’ or ‘blue throat’ after swallowed all the poisons of the
world during the churning of the ocean. Similar to Ritwik, Neelkantha was also
a middle class leftist intellectual but unorthodox, battered and isolated by the
mainstream left and the society in general. His demeanor alienated him from
his family and friends but by the sparkling insights, high optimism for life and
honesty to the core, Neelkantha in many ways resembles Ritwik.

Coming from an educated Bengali feudal family, Ritwik was the product of the
generation of forties. The era, marked by events like the World War, the 1943
Bengal famine ensuing to a death toll of nearly five million people,
Independence and partition of India. It was also the age of the rising trend of
communism. Like many educated youth of his time, Ritwik soon connected
himself with the ideology of Marxism. He became associated with IPTA (Indian
People's Theater Association), the cultural wing of Communist Party of India
(CPI). IPTA had played a seminal roll in the cultural scene of India by churning
out fresh concepts on artistic and cultural standards. Whole flocks of artists and
performers who will later dominate the Indian cultural milieu developed their
artistic credo through IPTA. Ritwik was no exception. 

“You are always a partisan, for or against.”

His engagement with IPTA was not only as a playwright, actor and director but

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also as a cultural theorist. In 1954, he drafted his thesis ‘On the Cultural Front’
outlining the cultural agenda of IPTA and the Communist Party in general
articulating its ideological, political and organizational programme. Ritwik’s
views were not taken well by the party leadership and he was labeled as a
‘Trotskyite’. His separation from the communist party and IPTA in 1955 was a
consequence of this dispute. Ritwik later documented his observations on IPTA
in his film Komal Gandhar. However, one of his fellow traveller, the folk singer
and composer Hemanga Biswas later wrote in his reminiscence that,

"Ritwik made an error in understanding the people’s theater movement

because – he did not get into it through any people’s movement. His
misconception was reflected in the film Komal Gandhar where conflict between
leaders, cell meeting and so on became his main concern, whereas the main
point, the people’s movement, was left touched." 

Ritwik in the later days has always admitted that he was never hesitant about
his commitment for the oppressed masses and was always an ‘engaged’ artist.
He believed that, ‘showing extreme antipathy against the evils and deeply
caring the finer elements of the society is the responsibility of every artists of
all ages’. In his later life he tried to amalgamate Marxism with the ideas of the
psychoanalyst, CG Jung because he felt that there is no inherent contradiction
between Marx and Jung. On the contrary, one is compensating the other. 

After his departure from IPTA, his eagerness to reach out to the people brought
him into film making. He considered cinema as the most dynamic and powerful
medium of communicating and influencing people. However, in a 1973
interview he had characteristically remarked, “If tomorrow or ten years later, a
new medium arrives which is more powerful than cinema, I will kick out cinema
and embrace the new medium.” It is understandable that Ritwik was too much
concerned to reach out to the people, as he believed that “people are the last
word of all form of arts”. His first directorial debut was the unfinished
film Bedeni. In 1952 at the age of 27, he directed Nagarik, a film depicting the
stark reality of a middle class refugee family’s struggle for existence and hope.
Mostly IPTA people were involved in making the film in a cooperative venture

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with a shoestring budget. The film never released in his lifetime.
After Nagarik until his death, Ritwik completed seven more feature films and
ten documentaries. With the exception of the 1960 release Meghe Dhaka
Tara all his other films were commercial disasters. 

The majority of Ritwik’s films are narratives, focused on the post-

Independence, post-partition Bengali life. He had deeply sensed the pain of the
partition catastrophe and leaving aside Ajantrik, and Titash Ekti Nadir Nam,
most of his cinema tried to accentuate this scar. The partition of India affected
ten million people who were forced to leave their ancestral homeland and
migrate to unknown places. Families were divided; relatives, friends and
neighbors were left behind. Insecurity, anxiety and extreme suffering of the
displaced people led to religious hatred, distrust and a break down of basic
human values. The traumatic consequence of partition which he had considered
as the most tragic incidence of the nation’s history had left a profound effect on
his creative thinking. He tried to express through his films how the partition has
struck the very roots of Bengali society and culture. In his own words: “Being a
Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my
people in the name of independence—which is a fake and a sham. I have
reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of
this.” 

All through his creative life, Ritwik remained nostalgic and highly emotional
about his pre partition days. But his romantic longing for the conceptual
‘motherland’ was devastated when he went to film Titas Ekti Nadir Naam in
Bangladesh (East Bengal was transformed into East Pakistan after partition and
later in 1971 liberated as the independent nation Bangladesh). He realized that
the Bengal of his dream, the two Bengals together were “thirty years out of
date”. He was madly excited about rediscovering his lost roots, to embrace his
beloved ‘motherland’ but shocked to find that: 

"My childhood and my early youth were spent in East Bengal. The memories of
those days, the nostalgia maddened me and drew me towards Titash, to make
a film on it...when I was making the film, it occurred to me that nothing of the

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past survives today, nothing can survive. History is ruthless. No, it is all lost.
Nothing remains." 

Ritwik’s niece Mahasweta Devi, in an essay had criticized this outlook. She
considered that Ritwik lacked a sense of history. According to her, in his entire
life Ritwik had an infantile stubbornness to disprove the reality around him and
had a natural characteristic of endless romanticism. His childhood was spent in
a sheltered atmosphere of a feudal landlord family and therefore he had never
experienced the anguish of the toiling and oppressed around him. Even in the
days of his childhood, the condition of the nation and its people were not so
glittery, as he had perceived it to be. Anarchy, starkness and uprooted
conditions did not spark off immediately after independence or the partition. In
the contrary, according to Mahasweta, the disaster was the obvious historical
development in the way the nation was going through. If Ritwik was capable of
sensibly reading history and not living in his nostalgic world he would have
realized this truth long before.

Commercial failure, lack of proper recognition and always short of money was
slowly destroying the man. Ritwik’s descend to alcoholism began after Komal
Gandhar was withdrawn from the theaters only a week after its release. The
film was allegedly thwarted by his former comrades who could not stomach a
renegade’s version of the IPTA movement! His most demanding
film Subarnarekha was released in 1962 and was running in packed houses but
without any explanation the film was abruptly withdrawn from the theaters by
the distributor. Shocked and frustrated, Ritwik soon became irreversibly
alcoholic, starting with branded liquor and ultimately settling down with the
country version of it. In a Jukti Takko Aar Gapposcene, the protagonist
Neelkantha Bagchi was offered a glass of imported liquor by the commercially
successful writer Satyajit Bose –  the phonetic resemblance of the name clearly
indicating a contemporary “former” communist writer. Neelkantha refused the
glass and bantered, “All my body hair will fall if I drink it”. Ritwik’s utter
economic needs compelled him to join the Film and Television Institute of India
in Pune as Vice Principal in 1965. He spent eighteen months there and
established himself as an excellent teacher but his outspokenness and
uncompromising nature was totally inapt for an administrative governmental
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post. Soon he resigned and returned to Kolkata leaving behind his notable
students Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Sayeed Mirza. 

Even in his worst physical, mental and economic conditions Ritwik continued to
dream of being a people’s artist and was astonishingly optimistic with full of
new ideas. The way he completed his last two films, struggling with the grave
health conditions is simply unbelievable. After a continuous seventeen days
outdoor shoot for Titash Ekti Nadir Nam he ultimately collapsed by a near-fatal
attack of phthisis and was evacuated by a helicopter straight into a hospital
where he had to spend several months under treatment. While filming and
acting in the main role of Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, he was vomiting blood in
regular intervals. All these examples are the evidence of his commitment and
sincerity towards his work. It is appropriate to recall the observation of the
eminent poet and journalist Samar Sen on Ritwik:

"Quite a few artists are lingering around by virtue of progressiveness. Ritwik,

keeping in mind many of his weaknesses, was in no way a spurious
progressive."

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The relentless tragedy of Ritwik 

Nearly quarter of a century after his death, Ritwik Ghatak’s films show the power of
creativity of a people’s artist who authored an Indian/SouthAsian language of cinema.
If only we knew…

by Partha Chatterjee

An artiste, even in this age of mindless greed and hurry, captures

the public imagination, if only for a moment or two, should he or
she answer to type, that is, of being a romantic idealist. Ritwik
Ghatak, the Bengali filmmaker and short story writer, was such an
individual and an alcoholic to boot, like the Urdu poet of romance
and revolution, Majaz Lucknawi; or Sailoz Mookerjea, the painter
Ritwik
whose soul made a daily creative journey across continents—from
Ghatak:
the French countryside of the Impressionists to the verdant green
prescient,
Bengal of his childhood and youth, and austere, dusty Delhi where
plastic
he finally settled down. Like them, Ghatak died young – in his fifty-
and rich
first year, on 6 February 1976. His send-off was perfunctory, like
with
the ones accorded to Majaz and Sailoz, and it took a long time for a
under-
larger public to gauge the worth of the three of them. The reason
stated
for this neglect was probably the lack of access to their work.
possibility
In retrospect, Ghatak stands a better chance of being in the public .
gaze because of the nature of his medium—cinema—which has a
far greater reach than either poetry or painting. He had problems finding
finance for his films because of his inability to suffer fools, especially in the film
world, and this compounded with a talent for insulting hypocrites, including
would-be producers, when drunk, made his own life and that of his family
completely miserable.

He forgot that he lived in a country that was simultaneously half-feudal and

half-capitalist and was still emerging from the shadow of colonialism. Directness
and honesty in private and professional life were qualities lauded in the abstract
but viewed with suspicion, even fear, in the real world. In Ghatak’s case, it was
inevitable that alienation and unemployment would lead to alcoholism,

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bankruptcy and an early death. His worldly failure was somehow seen as the
touchstone of ‘artistic worth’ by a certain section of the Indian elite and he was
claimed by them as one of their own some ten years ago. This is all the more
ironic for they have neither knowledge nor intuition of the language or the
culture that made a genius like him possible.

Like many communists of his time, Ghatak came from the feudal class, but
from its educated minority that had access to Sanskrit, Bengali, Persian,
English, the literature and philosophy of Europe, including the writings of
Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and the heritage of Hindustani and Western
classical music. To this formidable intellectual baggage he added, in later years
of artistic maturity, the ideas of the psychoanalyst, CG Jung, the explorations in
cultural anthropology, including the Great Mother image in Joseph Campbell’s
prose, derived from Erich Neuemann’s The Great Mother, and the vast
repertoire of folklore and folk music of India, and the two Bengals—East and
West.

Like many young people of his generation, Ghatak joined the Indian People’s
Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India
(CPI). This organisation had rendered yeomen service during the Bengal famine
of 1943, which witnessed a death toll of five million. IPTA had brought succour
to the starving and destitute in the state by bringing them food supplies and, in
Bijon Bhattacharya, found a dedicated actor and playwright who wrote the
path-breaking Bengali play Nabanna (New Harvest) on the cataclysm.
Bhattacharya, was to soon marry Ghatak’s niece, Mahashweta Devi, who is the
celebrated writer and activist of today.

IPTA travelled from village to village and to the small towns in Bengal, apart
from playing in Calcutta and its suburbs, and soon had roots all over India. It
did contemporary Indian plays and significant Western ones as well. In
addition, the ‘song squad’ was famous for its musical acumen and rousing
repertoire. The organisation’s role in the evolving of cultural values in
independent India was seminal. To say that modern ideas in Indian theatre and
cinema grew out of the activities of IPTA would be no exaggeration.

Ghatak’s own growth as an artiste and a socially conscious individual can be

linked to his apprenticeship in the IPTA as a fledging playwright, actor and
director. He took his first tentative steps in the cinema in Nemai Ghosh’s left-

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wing neo-realist Chinna mool, about East Bengali refugees who come to
Calcutta after partition. He himself played a young comb seller. Ghatak could
never give up acting and cast himself in cameo roles in some of the films he
was to direct later.

The three earth-shaking events of twentieth century India, viz, the Bengal
famine, the second world war and the partition of country in 1947 marked him
for life. The bestiality and madness that perverted human relations during this
period made him a confirmed pessimist, though he tried bravely to bring hope
and sunshine in the last scenes of all his films. The psychological effect usually
was the opposite.

When Ghatak made his first film, Nagarik, in 1952, he was nearing 27. It was
produced on half-a-shoe-string budget with actors mostly from IPTA, and had
for its story the travails of a middle-class refugee family from East Bengal which
had banked unwisely on the job prospects of the older son to keep it afloat.
Rather a grim beginning for a budding artiste. The film was never released in
his lifetime and only a negative struck from a damaged print discovered at
Bengal Lab, in Tollygunge, Calcutta, a year after his death made a token two-
week commercial release possible.

The lack of outward polish in Nagarik could not suppress innate qualities that
revealed a genuine involvement with social issues; a caring attitude towards
the sorrows of the deprived; an unusual sense of music, incidental sound and
camera placement and confident handling of actors. The great Bengali stage
actress, Prabha Devi’s performance as the nurturing mother was the high point
of the film and a close second was Kali Prasanna Das’s music, that included the
song, ‘Priye Pran Kathin Kathore’, set to the lyrics of Maithili mystic poet,
Vidyapati. There was enough in this first work to indicate the arrival of a
director capable of rising to great heights given the opportunity. But that was
still five years away.

His second feature film, Ajantrik, came after much struggle. Following the non-
release of Nagrik, three-and-a-half years were spent in Bombay, writing scripts,
first for Filmistan Studio whose boss, S Mukherjee, he tried to wean away from
the hackneyed charm of commercial Hindi cinema. Ghatak then worked for
Bimal Roy Productions and wrote the story and screen play for the memorable
ghost-romance, Madhumati. His other worthy script was for Hrishikesh

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Mukerjee’s debut film, Musafir, that included in its three tales O Henry’s The
Last Leaf.

Ghatak’s 1957 release Ajantrik too was based on a literary work, like his very
first venture, Bedini (1951), abandoned after a 20-day outdoor schedule when
the shot footage got spoilt by a camera defect. Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s
tale about gypsies never got to the screen, but Subodh Ghosh’s memorable
short story did. It was about a cranky, poetic cab-driver’s attachment to his
1926 model Chevrolet named Jaggadal that he drives in the Chhotanagpur
tribal belt in Bihar. It was Ghatak’s first major artistic success. He had prepared
for it by directing a two-reel documentary simply entitled The Oraons of
Chotanagpur on the tribe of that name for the Aurora Film Corporation,
Calcutta, and another short, Bihar Ke Kuch Darshaniye Sthaan (Some scenic
locales of Bihar), for the state government. These exercises helped Ghatak
develop a grasp of the landscape that became an organic part of Ajantrik’s
narrative. Perhaps it was for the first time that nature was used with such
poetic authority in an Indian film to bring into focus both its concrete and
abstract elements.

When the jalopy is sold as scrap, after its final breakdown following an
expensive restoration job, to a dealer wearing diamond earnings, the most
stone-hearted viewer’s heart is wrenched despite the premonition of the
inevitable that hovers over the film almost from the beginning. The final
moments have indeed the clarity of a parable, as Bimal (Kali Banerjee), the taxi
driver, hears and sees a little boy playing with the discarded horn of his beloved
car on which he had lavished the attention he would on a dearly loved wife. The
wisdom and charm of Ajantrik is elusive, almost metaphysical, although it deals
with a very real situation in human terms. The Communist Party of India
welcomed the film with open arms after driving away its director on grounds of
being a Trotskyite. The left felt it depicted the dialectics between man and
machine to great effect. Still others saw it as a satire on the haphazard
industrial development in the newly independent country and its negative effect
on the countryside. But there were too many disparate elements within the
story to ensure a clear-cut, all-embracing interpretation.

What, however, could not be accounted for was the prominence given to the
local lunatic, Bula (played unforgettably by Keshto Mukherjee), who is attached

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to his aluminium plate and is the butt of cruel jokes of the children who hover
around him. The only concession to rationality in the conception of his role is
when, towards the end of the film, he is seen jubilantly hugging his new plate
and dancing around, saying, “Oh my new thali, my new thali”! This bit prepares
us for the idea that will assert itself in the end, that the old makes way for the
new and, therefore, of the continuity of life. It is, however, difficult to interpret
in strictly intellectual terms the backward descent of Jaggadal down a steep
slope, with fields of ripening paddy on either side, during its test run after Bimal
has spent all his savings towards repairs.

Then, of course, there is that deceptive shot that follows soon after. It looks pat
but is not. Bimal pushes his broken-down car over a high bridge with the help
of adivasi men and women, some of whom are seated in the vehicle. Just as
they reach the middle, a steam locomotive comes roaring in on the tracks
below. There is also the charming little scene of Bimal all dressed up with his
boy assistant to get himself and his car photographed by the local view-camera
master who asks him not to smile foolishly lest the picture be spoilt! A night
dance in the forest by the Oraon tribals that Bimal attends and is quite drunk at
the end of, is extremely lyrical. Shots of the car making its way through rain-
lashed landscapes and, of course, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s haunting rendering of
raga Bilas Khani Todi on the sarod, all add up to create a work of art that
makes the viewer feel that he has been onto important things, indeed privy to
secrets related to man and nature.

A fairly low negative cost of one lakh thirty-five thousand rupees was difficult to
recover with Ajantrik’s release. Even the money spent on prints and publicity
expenses was not recouped. The Bengali audience of 1957 was completely
bewildered by a film in which a recalcitrant old car was the hero, with its
eccentric driver as its most effective supporting cast. There were, of course,
other fine cameo performances. But the viewers in Calcutta, despite Pather
Panchali and Aparajito by Satyajit Ray, were completely unprepared for
Ghatak’s cinematic poem. More than a quarter of a century went by before
recognition came for the film’s path-breaking qualities. Cahiers du Cinema
compared its director’s unique juxtaposition of sound and image, after its Paris
screening in 1983, to the explorations of great European experimentalists like
Jean Marie Straub, Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson. Sadly, recognition first
came abroad. Small sections of discerning viewers in India gradually woke up
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to its merits. The film’s use of incidental sounds served the purpose of another
‘voice’, giving a human dimension to a machine by its presence.

Pramod Lahiri, the producer, had already made a touching serio-comedy, Paras
Pathar with Satyajit Ray and was about to embark on a new film with him
when, at Ray’s insistence, he decided to do Bari Theke Paliye, based on a story
by humorist Shibram Chakravarti, in 1959 with Ghatak in the hope of making
up his losses on Ajantrik. The story of a stern village schoolmaster’s pre-
teenage son who runs away to the metropolis of Calcutta in search of the EI
Dorado that he has read about did not gell. What could have been a sparkling
children’s film became a dull tract on the heartlessness of city life where only
the poor have humanity and the rich are indifferent. The director fell prey to the
necessity of having a sabak or moral lesson for the prospective young viewer.
What one remembers after all these years about the film is the charming
performance of young Parambhattarak Lahiri, the producer’s son, as Kanchan,
the runaway little boy, and the lilting musical score by Salil Chowdhury.
Predictably, the film failed. Even Khaled Chaudhury’s hilarious poster could not
attract children in sufficient numbers to see it.

A married man with responsibilities, Ghatak turned now desperately to ‘saleable

material’. For his new venture he chose a well-written popular novel, Koto
Ajaana Rey by Shankar. Mihir Law, a successful paint manufacturer, provided
the wherewithal for an expensive production, albeit by Bengali standards.
Ghatak bought additional insurance by engaging a big star like Chabi Biswas to
play Barwell, the English barrister, a crucial figure in the novel. He also had Anil
Chatterjee, a fine actor whose star was rising at the box-office, and a
supporting cast that included Karuna Banerjee from Pathar Panchali and
Aparajito, and a powerful young left-wing theatre actor named Utpal Dutt. The
shooting progressed well and both director and producer were happy with the
results. Then, as on many other occasions in the artiste’s later life, shooting
came to a halt over an absurd incident. He had instructed the literal minded
‘Gorkha’ watchman of the studio not to let anyone in as he was shooting a
crucial scene in the script. The producer, Mihir Law too was denied admission
by the zealous sentry. Deeply insulted, he closed down production after having
already sunk several lakhs of rupees; big money for a black-and-white
production in the late 1950s!

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Ghatak kept the home fires burning by scripting Swaralipi for Asit Sen, a
successful commercial director and a highly skilled craftsman. Mahendra Kumar
Gupt, the producer of this film, teamed up with the scriptwriter with a certain
talent for attracting trouble to produce in 1959-60 Meghe Dhaka Tara, a film
that turned the tide in the director’s life and art. At the outset, Ghatak felt he
had been forced into a commercial transaction. But it proved a big hit and, to
everybody’s surprise, a genuine critical success as well. It is the one film on
which Ghatak’s reputation rests; the one work that everyone hails as an
unqualified masterpiece; a seminal depiction of the existential dilemma of the
Indian lower middle class, where the sacrifice of the one good, meek, dutiful
daughter - she dies tragically of TB in the end - ensures the survival of the rest
of the family. Shaktipada Raj Guru’s ordinary melodrama, Chena Mukh, thus
became the source of one of the most emotionally rich films ever made
anywhere in the world.

Gross misdemeanours 

Ghatak promptly invested the two-and-a-half lakh rupees he had earned from
this film in the new one, Komal Gandhar, a marvellous picaresque comedy with
serious undertones that obliquely examined the causes behind the failure of the
IPTA and, by extension, the CPl. It was a glorious artistic achievement and,
ironically, a hopeless tactical error that was to ruin the rest of his life. An
original screenplay full of pathos, humour and music and daring technique – the
film was twenty years ahead of its time - there was enough in Komal Gandhar
to drive an aware filmmaker wild with jealousy and the party bosses, who
thought they had seen the last of him, to despair.

To digress to the background of the film and its subject matter: the communist
movement in India reached its height in 1948-49 when, in the Telangana
district of Andhra Pradesh, an armed struggle by the peasantry led by the CPI
against the Indian state took place. The ill-fed, barely-armed revolutionaries
were soon overwhelmed and the CPI was banned by the ruling party, the Indian
National Congress. The left, so to say, was wiped out in a trice, and, after a
humiliating compromise in the early 1950s, came back to participate in
parliamentary politics. There was an elected communist government in Kerala
in 1957 and then the breakaway Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) led
by Jyoti Basu formed the ministry in West Bengal in 1977. Having eschewed

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revolutionary politics, the communists in 1960-61, at the time of Komal
Gandhar’s making and release, had become, particularly their middle and upper
class leadership, adept coffee house debaters.

heir hold on the poor rural peasantry and the exploited urban working class was
eroding rapidly. Moreover, their finest cultural workers had already been driven
away by a myopic party ideologue by the name of Sudhi Pradhan. Most of
them, like Ghatak, Balraj Sahni, Salil Chowdhury, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi
Azmi, Shailendra, Vishmitra Adil and KA Abbas, left to earn a living in the
cinema, while Shambhu Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya and Utpal Dutt prospered in
theatre.

Ghatak’s criticism of the party’s cultural policy in his new film was seen as gross
misdemeanor by the bosses and worthy of severe punishment. Of that later.

Komal Gandhar was about a committed theatre group that reached out to the
people in the countryside, bringing to them genuine works of art. There is the
staging of Shakuntala, the Sanskrit classic by Kalidas, in the film. which
perhaps was included as an extension of Ghatak’s own memories of having
directed onstage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Rabindranath
Tagore’s Visarjan for IPTA in the early 1950s. There are resonances and
nuances within the story that would have got to the sensibilities of even the
most obtuse of partymen. The inclusion of a scene from Shakuntala looks like
deliberate guerrilla warfare despite its redolent romance. Shakuntala helped by
her female companions, is dressing up in her guru’s jungle ashram to look
beautiful for her lover Dushyanta, a king travelling incognito with his
entourage. He, getting her with child, shall forget her on reaching his kingdom.
Nothing of the latter part of his life is shown but the story is too well-known in
India and Shakuntala at her toilette on camera would subliminally help the
audience to imagine her fate. Shakuntala is of course India, Dushyanta the CPI
and their prospective child the ordinary people of India.

Laughter and tears are good companions in this moving film that makes
nonsense of artificial geographic borders and manufactured history. A common
heritage of language, music and customs brings people together and the
machinations of demented politicians forcibly divide them along with the land
where they have their roots. All the wars fought in the last hundred years have
been over purely commercial considerations; racism has always been used

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alongside as an excuse to consolidate business gains. A snatch of an old
folksong is heard in the film - Aey Paar Paddaa 0 Paar Paddaa/ Moddi Khaaney
Chaur/Tahaar Moddeye Bosheye/Aachen Shibo Saudagor (“On this bank is the
river Padma / On the other bank is the Padma too / And an island lies between
them / Where lives Lord Shiva / The trader-great”).

Another example of the syncretic culture of undivided Bengal that inflects the
film is the chorus literally crying out “Dohai Ali!” (Mercy Ali!) in gradually
increased speed as the camera simulates the movement of a train hurtling
forward towards the end of the railway tracks that are closed to acknowledge
the presence of the new country - Pakistan. There is also the repeated use of
the wedding song from East Bengal - Aam Tolaaye Zhumur Zhaamur/Kaula
Tawlaaye Biyaa/Aayee lo Shundorir Zhaamaayee/Mukut Maathaye Diyaa (“A
stirring of breezes cool in the mango grove/A wedding blessed by the
auspicious green plantains all around/ Comes now the groom for the beauteous
bride/Wearing chivalry’s glorious crown”). This song comes on at the most
unexpected moments in the background, most expressively in the landscape
shots of the

undulating khoai in Santiniketan when the two protagonists Bhrigu (Abaneesh

Bandopadhyay) and Ansuiyya (Supriya Choudhury), unknown to themselves,
fall in love with each other. There is also the snatch of a bhawaiyya sung by
Debabrata Biswas towards the end of the film as he comes to a concert early in
the morning. The use of the two Rabindra Sangeets is effective: first with actor
Anil Chatterjee who lips on camera Debabrata Biswas’s rendering of Aakash
Bhauraa/Shurjo Taara (“This endless expanse of sky filled/with Suns and
Stars”) to great effect in broad daylight in Kurseong, of all places; and then in a
poetic simulation of moonlight Aaj Jyotsna Raatey Shobaaee Gaecheye Boneye
(“On this full-moon night/lovers together, go to the woods”) sung by Sumitra
Sen on the soundtrack. There are old IPTA group songs too that add to the
texture of the film’s narration and serve the same purpose as an obligato would
in a musical score.

Komal Gandhar, for all its adolescent preoccupation with the idea of mother and
motherland and, at the same time, the authentic poetic connection between the
two, is also a loving tribute to the nation-building energies that went into the
activities of the IPTA which was, before it was sabotaged from within by the

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CPI, an organisation of idealists who had a purity of purpose and dreamt of
building a contended egalitarian India.

The release was stymied reportedly by the party with the help of goons who
owed allegiance to the ruling Congress party. According to Ghatak, Komal
Gandhar played to a responsive packed house in the first week. Then, at the
beginning of the second, he began to notice strange happenings in the dark of
the theatre. Loud sobbing would be heard from different parts of the hall during
funny or romantic scenes and raucous laughter at moments of sorrow, sending
conflicting messages to the audience. Attendance rapidly dwindled by mid-week
and fell away altogether at the end of it. The film had to be withdrawn, causing
an enormous financial loss to the two producers, Mahendra Gupt and Ghatak
himself. It was later discovered that a fairly large number of tickets were
bought by shady characters, who had been instructed to disturb the real
audience.

The failure engineered by forces inimical to his integrity as an artiste and

person, completely shattered the director. He could not believe that the very
people who not so long ago had been his comrades could get together to sink
him. His descent into alcoholism had begun. Beer suddenly gave way to hard
liquor and relentless drinking occupied him more than cinema, literature, the
plastic arts or music. “He was signing in three bars for his drinks, and, not
being able to drink alone, was also being the generous host”, remembered
Barin Saba, iconoclast, filmmaker and social activist in 1977, a year after the
director’s death. Quite naturally, funds were going to run out sooner than later.
People had barely understood Komal Gandhar during its subverted release and
that fact too undermined his self-confidence. Then, Abhi Bhattacharya, an old
actor friend, appeared out of nowhere to bail him out.

Bhattacharya took Ghatak back with him to Bombay, where he lived and
worked, to help him recuperate from the excesses of his emotional life. One
evening he came back with a proposal. A friend of his, one Radheyshyam
Jhunjhunwala, was willing to finance a feature film in Bengali with Abhi
Bhattacharya in the lead and to be directed by his beleaguered friend. There
was, however, one condition—that the volatile director behave himself during
the entire period of its making. The story, or its bare skeleton, was provided by
the producer himself. It was about a brother and sister who are separated in

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childhood and meet as adults quite by accident, she as a prostitute making her
debut and he as her first customer. When they suddenly recognise each other,
she kills herself. A desperate Ghatak agreed and took enough of an advance to
complete the shooting of the film.

The golden line

Subarnarekha (1962) was an act of magic in which the artiste transformed the
producer’s puerile story into a multi-dimensional meditation on life, with the
partition serving as a backdrop. When he saw the rough cut, Jhunjhunwala
panicked and ran away. Ghatak then did the only advertising short of his life for
Imperial Tobacco Company, publicising the popular brand of Scissors cigarettes,
courtesy his old friend, Chidananda Dasgupta, who was chief of public relations
there. With the proceeds he got the first print of Subarnarekha out of the
laboratory. It was only after Subarnarekha was sold to Rajshree Pictures,
owned by Tarachand Barjatia, to ‘balance’ their books in a particularly profitable
year, that Jhunjhunwala reappeared on the scene.

In the three years between the completion of Subarnarekha and its release in
1965, Ghatak’s life was like a see-saw. He tried unsuccessfully to get backing
for a film based on Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay’s Aaranyak. Ghatak was
perfect for the subject, for no one since the American documentary poet,
Robert Flaherty, had responded to nature with such feeling and understanding
in cinema. Set in the wilderness, the novel ran as a counter point to the urban
world. It was worthy as anything written by the great writer on nature in
English literature, WH Hudson. If there was anyone who could grasp the link
between the metaphysical and the physical that was there on the written page
and transfer it to the screen without loss of intensity, it was Ghatak. But
Jagganath Koley, heir to a well known Calcutta biscuit company and minister of
information and broadcasting in the state government, could not, despite his
best efforts, convince the bureaucracy under him to sponsor the film and waive
the mandatory bank guarantee that the director was unable to provide.

Then, of course, there was the adaptation from Italian Alexander Blassetti’s hit
serio-comedy, Two Steps into the Clouds, filmed in 1941. Bagalar
Bangadarshan, in its 1964 Bengali reincarnation is completely transformed to
suit the local milieu. It flows elegantly in print and captures the abiding values
of rural Bengal without appearing to be remotely reactionary, and with unusual

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wit and charm. The four reels that were actually shot were lovely to look at but
Ghatak’s inability to oblige an unusually decent producer, Raman Lal
Maheshwari, by not drinking on the sets—as his quick mood changes unsettled
the actors—led to its closure. Had it been completed, Bagalar Bangadarshan
would have posed real problems for all those people who pigeon-hole him as
the tragedian of the partition of India. The story of an absconding village
tomboy, brought home by a young, married Calcutta medical representative
she meets on the way, was both touching and hilarious. On their return to her
village he is mistaken for her husband. Her fiancé lurks about nearby without
being able to do anything. It is discovered in the course of events that he ran
away after impregnating her in Calcutta because she was in the habit of beating
him up! Of course, all ends well in the script of this comedy of Shakespearean
resonance.

The release of Subarnarekha, meanwhile, was a success and it played to

packed houses before Rajshree Pictures realised it had actually bought the film
as a tax writeoff, having made huge amounts of money earlier with a Hindi
melodrama, Dosti. To Ghatak’s shock and surprise, his film was withdrawn from
Calcutta theatres without explanation. It was the most demanding film he had
ever made, and, in scope and breadth surpassed everything he had done
before. The filming, it is reported, was improvised on a day-to-day basis. Not
even a master improviser like the Swiss-French director Jean-Luc Goddard, had
ever been through such an ordeal.

Subarnarekha is about rational elements like history, war and its aftermath,
mass displacement and loss of an old habitat and hence roots on the one hand,
and irrational entities like destiny and fate that are not supposed to but do
affect human beings and their conduct to alter their lives irreversibly on the
other. Ishwar Chakravarti, a man of god as his first name seems to suggest,
comes after partition as a refugee from East Bengal to live with his fellow
sufferers in Navjeevan Colony, a settlement for the displaced on the outskirts of
Calcutta. With him is his little sister, Sita, and an orphan, Abhiram, whom he
has accepted as his little foster brother.

Ishwar meets Rambilas, an old friend and now a prosperous industrialist,

accidentally in the street. Hearing of his plight, he offers Ishwar a job managing
his factory by the river Subarnarekha in Bihar. Harprasad, the schoolmaster

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who has nurtured the new home of his fellow unfortunates, accuses Ishwar of
being a coward and for thinking only of his own welfare and not that of the
others around him. We are plunged into the heart of a morality tale that can
only end in tragedy. And a tragedy it is, borrowing its narrative method from
the ancient Indian epics and folk tales where there are digressions in the
shoreline with moral and metaphysical ideas thrown up for the audience’s
knowledge, but the end effect is overwhelming, cleansing and uplifting.
Subarnarekha illustrates the idea, long before the Russian master, Andrei
Tarkovsky, thought of it and used it as the title of his autobiography, that
cinema is indeed sculpting in time.

The most illuminating moments occur in Ghatak’s cinema as in Luis Bunuel’s, a

director he particularly admired, not in great bursts of dramatic action but in
the gaps between them. The bravura scenes are there only to confirm what we
have intuitively gathered to be the essential ingredients of the unfolding story.
These are the real moments of revelation. This is true particularly of
Subarnarekha, where plainness and exaggeration coexist in a technique born
out of necessity; the producer had to be lulled into believing that a lurid
melodrama was in the making, which would on its release make a killing at the
box-office.

The most talked about revelatory moment in the film is of course when the
child, Sita, accidentally runs into the bohurupee (quick change artiste) dressed
as Mahakaal, the scourge of time, and is shocked at the sight of him. When he
is chided by the broken-down old accountant of the factory where Ishwar is
manager, for scaring a little girl, the man replies, “I did not try to scare her, sir,
she sort of ran into me”. The little scene takes on a new dimension when it is
learnt that the old man consoling her has been in a precarious emotional state
himself ever since his own daughter eloped with her lover. The scene is further
enriched when he and Sita walk away from the camera and we hear him ask
her name and on hearing it proceeds tell her the story of Janak, the king of
Mithila, who one day found his daughter, Sita, in the very soil he was tilling.
When seen in the context of the whole film, the scene’s function seems to be
oracular, a prediction, as it were, of Sita and Abhiram’s tragic future together
as adults.

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There is a sudden flash of prophetic intuition in a scene from Sita and
Abhiram’s childhood when they pretend to be aircraft taking off from a long-
forgotten, dilapidated second world war British airstrip near Panagarh in the
Bengal countryside. At the climax of their game, through the use of a
subjective camera, they appear to personify an aircraft taking flight. Truth in
the arts, particularly the cinema, is achieved through such enunciatory acts.
There are other instances of poetic insight in a film where the paradox and
irony of life become apparent all of a sudden.

On the same desolate airstrip Sita sings a bandish in raga Kalavati, “Aaj ki
anando” (“Oh, how joyful is the day”). The raga is also used to create a sombre
mood, when she sings a different composition at the same sight at dusk, after
her elder brother, who is like a father to her, rejects the fact that she and
Abhiram are in love and would like to marry. The abandoned airstrip is used for
the last time in the final quarter of the film, when Ishwar and the ghost from
his past, Harprasad, the idealist schoolteacher and founder of Navjeevan
Colony, arrive there after a night of despair, when he is prevented by his
friend’s sudden appearance from hanging himself out of grief following Sita’s
elopement with Abhiram.

The final scene, heart-breaking and of surpassing beauty with Ishwar and Binu,
the orphaned little son of Sita and Abhiram, walking away towards a craggy
landscape with the horizon far in the background, accompanied by choral
chanting of the Charai betiye mantra on the sound track, in search of a new
life, sums up the forced political and hence historical displacement of millions,
in our own times and earlier, people whose only crime was that they had
sought a little peace, dignity and happiness in their lives.

Betrayed by belief

While Ishwar and his nephew were able to go out to find a new life at the end
of Subarnarekha, Ghatak’s own was fast reaching a point of no return. A
cherished documentary on Ustad Allauddin Khan of Maihar, the father figure of
Hindustani instrumental music in the post-1940 era, had to be abandoned after
the shooting because Ghatak had the first of his alcohol-related breakdowns.
After waiting for a recovery that did not come quick enough, the producer
Harisadhan Dasgupta, reluctantly patched together a version for the Films
Division of India. It was predictably, not the film Ghatak had conceived.

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Sheer economic necessity had forced him to join the Film and Television
institute of India, Pune, in 1965 as Vice Principal. His controversial 18 months
there proved him to be an outstanding teacher. He did ghost-direct the
haunting short, Rendezvous, a diploma film credited to Rajendranath Shukla,
photographed ingeniously by Amarjeet Singh at the Karla caves in Lonavala
near Pune. Always a practical man when it came to filmmaking, Ghatak had
once filmed a tree in the early morning light in black-and-white in order to help
his students connect with nature in their lives and art. Needless to say, the
result was exquisite. This single shot of three hundred feet or three minutes
and twenty seconds in 35mm was preserved in the institute vaults for many
years and may still be there to inspire new generations of filmmakers.

Ghatak came back to Calcutta, having resigned his job at Pune, to resume a
career that was already in the doldrums. He wrote the story, ‘Pandit Mashai’,
now lost, in a non-stop seventeen-hour session, and collapsed at the end of it.
He produced a screenplay based on it called Janmabhoomi that still survives.
The story is of a Sanskrit scholar and teacher who seeks refuge after the
partition in a traditional crematorium or burning ghat along with his young
daughter. Their lives are destroyed in the course of events, as it happened with
millions in Ghatak’s generation who, in order to live, had to adapt to the cruelty
and indifference of changing times but could not. They were people who
believed in the regenerative powers of love for themselves and for others and
were betrayed for their beliefs.

Ghatak adapted Manik Bandopadhyay’s classic novel, Padda Nadir Majhi for the
screen and carried a bound copy with him till the end and tried to get his old
friend, producer Hiten Choudhury, sculptor Sankho Choudhury’s elder brother
and editor Sachin Choudhury’s younger brother, to produce it in colour. He also
wrote the script for the Ashtamsarga of Kalidas’s Kumara Sambhava. These
were two projects that he wanted to do very badly. But failing health and
hospitalisation for psychiatric disorders, including a diagnosis of dual
personality by doctors at the Gobra Mental Asylum, Calcutta, and chronic lack
of even basic expense money prevented him from filming them. His wife,
Surama, in the meanwhile, had gone out to teach and keep the wolf from the
door.

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In 1968, he began Ranger Golam, an adaptation of a novel by Narayan Sanyal,
“with amazing confidence”, in the words of Anil Chatterjee, who was to play the
lead. Chatterjee had earlier played a cameo as an irresponsible, thieving young
husband in Ajantrik and then stellar role in Meghe Dhaka Tara as Shankar the
classical singer to whom fame and money come in time to pull his family out of
the financial mire but too late to save the life of the beloved tubercular elder
sister, Nita. And of course, he was the rebellious, thinking theatre actor in
Komal Gandhar. “Seeing him work, you wouldn’t believe he had been so ill just
before he began Ranger Golam”, said Chatterjee. A melancholic script added to
Ghatak’s refusal to stop drinking at work led to the closure of this production as
well. He was unable to understand that people investing money in a production
directed by him also had the right to feel emotionally secure in his presence.

Ghatak wrote the screenplay for Premendra Mitra’s heart-wrenching short story
Sansar Seemante. He wanted Madhavi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee in
the lead for the new film. Madhavi was moved to tears by the script and
declared it was the best thing she had ever come across. But, she said she
would only do the film if Ghatak did not drink on the sets. He flew into a rage
and stormed out of her house, kicking her pet Pomeranian standing in his way.
Shakti Samanta, a successful producer-director in the Hindi cinema of Bombay,
and an admirer of Ghatak’s work, offered to produce two films of his choice,
giving him complete artistic freedom. Again, Ghatak’s by-now-notorious temper
proved a stumbling block. He sent Shakti packing. Another fine opportunity was
lost.

Between 1968 and 1970, the director made four documentaries on commission.
Scientists of Tomorrow and Yeh Kyon were for the Films Division of India, and
Amar Lenin and Chau Dance of Purulia for the Government of West Bengal. Of
them, only Chau Dance of Purulia had any artistic merit, with certain moments
of genuine poetry in it. The rest were bread and butter jobs or, better still,
‘drink providing’ jobs. The war of liberation in Bangladesh in 1971 made him
direct Durbaar Gati Padma, a twenty minute piece of fiction with the improbable
pairing of Biswajeet, a chocolate-box hero of Hindi films, and a resurrected
retired female icon, Nargis Dutt. To put it mildly, it was a strange film but had
some impressive black-and-white shots of his beloved river Padma.

Ghatak’s anvil

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Ghatak had known Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the distant past and liked to
call her his Santiniketan connection. She had as a girl been all too briefly a
student there during Rabindranath Tagore’s lifetime. He happened to know
people close to her, particularly PN Haksar, an ex-communist and her main
advisor. It was through her good offices that he got the National Film
Development Corporation of India to finance Jukti Tappo Aar Gappo in 1971.
The selection committee felt that he was too much of an alcoholic to actually
complete and deliver a film within a given time-frame. Their objections were
overruled by the prime minister herself.

Jukti Takko Aar Gappo had enormous promise as a script. It was the story of
one Neelkantha Bagchi—the name is deliberately chosen to draw parallels
between Lord Shiva’s blue throat after having swallowed all the poisons-of-the-
world during the churning of the ocean and the character in the film, a played-
out alcoholic, once a respected teacher and intellectual. It is a not-so-veiled
self-portrait of the director himself. His wife and son leave him for being a failed
breadwinner and family man. He is about to leave his rented house before the
landlord evicts him, when he runs into Banga Bala, literally meaning Lass of
Bengal, who is a refugee from Bangladesh and, like him, is in futile search of a
shelter. The return of his protégé after the sale of a ceiling fan prompts him to
take to the streets with the two youngsters in tow. The rest of the film is about
Neelkantha’s misadventures and eventual death in the cross-fire between
Maoist revolutionaries and the police. Peripatetic but top-heavy with dialogue,
the film did nothing for Ghatak’s reputation.

While he was making Jukti in 1971, Bangladesh was liberated, and Pran Katha
Chitro, a Bangladeshi production company, invited him to direct a film for them
the following year. He chose Adwaitya MalIa Burman’s literary saga of an East
Bengali fishing community in the early decades of the twentieth century, Titash
Ekti Nadir Naam. He shot it in a record 17 days and nearly died in the process.
He had to be evacuated from location by helicopter and spent the next 18
months in hospital. The producers released the film, much to his chagrin,
without showing him the final cut. Having recovered somewhat, he went over to
Dakha to re-cut the film. “I am 75 per cent happy with the film. Work needs to
be done on the sound”, he declared in March 1975 to this writer after a
screening of the film in Sapru House, New Delhi, during the first retrospective
of his work in his lifetime, organised by the Bengalee Club, Kali Bari, New Delhi.
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Titash Ekti Nadir Naam is a relentless tragedy. There is no let-up through its
two-and-a-quarter hour run. It is dynamically photographed and the ensemble
acting is spirited throughout. The cinematic rendering of the novel is a curious
case of Thomas Hardy meeting with Hegel and Karl Marx in the riverine culture
of Bengal just as industrialisation is beginning to make a dent. The film
succeeds perhaps because of its authentic local flavour. Even jades in far-off
Manhattan, New York City, were moved to tears seeing it in a retrospective of
his films in 1996.

Ghatak’s conscious effort to keep the narrative on an even keel, giving

prominence to the river and the village near its bank and the characters living
there, would fool the viewer for a while into believing that a documentary by a
superior sensibility was unraveling on the screen. Then, suddenly, inexplicably
ambiguous poetic elements begin to make their presence felt, infusing tragic
grandeur into a story of a river drying up and leaving the fishing community on
its banks without livelihood or purpose, and making them prey to attacks of
goondas in the pay of city businessmen who wish to take over what has
become real estate.

Titash is by no means flawless. But its charge of emotion is genuine and

sustained from beginning to end and there is a sense of loss in its depiction
seldom approached in post-war cinema. Had it been his last film, it would have
been a worthy farewell but that was not to be.

Jukti Tappo Aar Gappo was received enthusiastically by the young turks of the
film society movement in Calcutta, but it was not a film worthy of his genius,
four excellent sequences notwithstanding and also Ghatak’s own gripping
performance as a drunken gadfly. The picturisation of the Tagore song, “Kaeno
Cheye Aacho go Maa” on Ghatak himself is kingly in its austerity. But, his
health had completely failed and he ran high fever, was vomiting blood during
the filming. The end was near.

When death came, he had for some years borne a resemblance to King Lear.
His hair had turned white, his body had shrunk and he looked thirty years older
than his actual age. Yet there was something majestic about him. Broken in
health but ever optimistic, Ghatak was full of plans. He had always wanted to
make a genuine children’s film and actively engaged in negotiations with the
Children’s Film Society of India to produce Princess Kalavati, based on a famous

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Bengali folktale, “Buddhu Bhutum”. He devised ways of achieving special effects
elegantly and effectively for the film within a modest budget.

The second important project on Ghatak’s anvil was Sheye O Bishnupriya, a

contemporary tale of rape and murder juxtaposed with the fate of the real
Bishnupriya, the unfortunate third wife of the medieval Vaishnav saint Sri
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu of Nabadwip, West Bengal. At another level, the script
dealt with the male’s gradual loss of paurush or manliness and sensitivity, his
fear of woman’s innate goodness and creativity, and his attempts to first reject
and then destroy it in the course of history.

Also on the anvil was an untitled comedy about a fishmonger, who is believed
to have won a huge lottery and his predictable rise in the esteem of certain
greedy business folk who want to grab his prize money. But luck decrees
otherwise. It is revealed that he has actually lost by the margin of a single
crucial digit blurred by the constant handling of his lottery ticket with grubby
hands. Ghatak wrote the script in tribute to his hero – Charlie Chaplin.

The best of Ritwik Ghatak continues to be invigorating cinema twenty-seven

years after his death: prescient, plastic and rich with under-stated possibility.
He always claimed that he did not care for storytelling in his films and that for
him the story was only a starting point. But in his own way he was a terrific
storyteller, who could, like the Indian literary masters before the industrial age
and much earlier, digress from the main story in a seemingly arbitrary fashion
and always return to enrich it. In this respect, Ghatak resembled his friend,
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the supreme improviser in Hindustani music, who at his
best can take the listener by complete surprise with his digressions from the
main composition in a given raga; by his sly asides, and his startling return to
the dominant theme to create new, unforeseen avenues of thought and feeling.

There are long stretches in Ajantrik, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar,
Subarnarekha and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam that create a bond with the viewer,
thus making him/her an integral part of the film’s creative process. Only the
finest of artistes in the performing arts have this quality. Ghatak at his best
certainly did.

It is a subcontinental pity he did not work more and was constantly strapped
for cash, and that he let the demons in his professional life take over his
personal life to the ultimate destruction of both. Ghatak did not have a strong
Page | 24
survival instinct like Bertolt Brecht did. He allowed mean and vicious people to
hurt him repeatedly and drive him to irreversible alcoholism, at which point he
began to hurt those who loved him the most and tried to help him. The left that
had made him an artiste in the first place, had by the end of his life - much
earlier, actually - abdicated its responsibility towards the exploited and the
spurned and begun to nurse bourgeois aspirations. Only he continued to dream
of being a people’s artiste, of working towards an Indian film language, though
not consciously. He was forced to accept, in penury, a documentary on Indira
Gandhi, deluding himself that he would get the better of her by portraying her
as Lady Macbeth. He was released from his agony when he turned up late and
drunk at Dum Dum airport in Calcutta during a leg of the shooting and she took
him off the project, inadvertently saving his dignity for posterity.

For a further understanding of the man, one must go back to Paras Pathar, a
story he wrote as a young man of twenty-three. In it, Chandrakant Sarkar, a
humble clerk in a colliery and a connoisseur of Hindustani music, attacks and
robs the assistant manager carrying the company’s payroll. He does so in order
to fund the research based on knowledge got from a travelling sadhu to bring
back to life the recently dead. When the law catches up with him he is seen by
a waterfall in the jungle, completely unhinged by the fact that he has lost the
piece of paper that had the formula the shaman had given him. Ritwik Ghatak’s
greatness and his vulnerability are symbolically predicted in this story.

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