Long after ViftMk Ghatak's lonely death, the significance of his work is finally bursting out of its obscurity.

His films arefextremely difficult P^see in India, and he is yet unknown !o,;th,e ; '?.'. larger Indian audience. But the film*; i; ^ themselves, brilliant and abrasive, are gradually revolutionary achievements in conterftfKOfafy ' ;i:f'.,.., criticism of Ghatak's work in, English, examines it within the modern1 Indian tradition. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (25) is a journaU^ has been a regular contributor to yatfit> journal's on the 1 rt)i:'||tt! art see ne.
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Ashish

Rajadhyaksha

RITWIK GHATAK A RETURN TO THE EPIC

Screen Unit

First printed in Bombay, 1982, by Screen Unit H-156 Mohan Nagar, off Datta Mandir Road, Dahanukar Wadi, Kandivili (W), Bombay 400067 No part of this manuscript may be reproduced or used in translation, without prior consent of Screen Unit ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Printed by Arun Naik at Akshar Pratiroop Pvt Ltd 42 Ambekar Marg, Bombay 400 031. Cover: Milon Mukherjee Design :Raza Modak Layout: Yeshwant Sawant, Yeshwant Pandit

For my mother

Price : Rs 45 Overseas : $ 9

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CONTENTS

This book could not have been written without the help of Arun Khopkar. Apart from his encouragement and suggestions which have been of vital use, I am particularly grateful for his painstaking translation of parts of Eisenstein's Non-Indifferent Nature from the Russian and French specifically for the purposes of this study. I am also grateful to Ceeta Kapur for her extended comments, and Kumar Shahani for his help which was curtailed by the fact that he himself features so prominently in the book. I would like to in fact use this opportunity to acknowledge a deep personal debt to Kumar for his encouragement and patience. With Chatak's films still so difficult to see, I am grateful to the National Film Archive of India for having extended to me their facilities of seeing films and taking stills, and to Prakash Yadav of Kiran Arts for his fine and expeditious work. I would like to thank Shanta Gokhale for her painstaking editing of my manuscript, Amrit Cangarof Screen Unit for atl his help, and Haimanti Bannerjee who made available her own analysis of Meghe Dhaka Tara to me. I must particularly acknowledge the tremendous help given to me by my father in every possible way.

Introduction

9 13

The BackdropPartition Chapter 1 The Dominant Tradition

16

Chapter 2 The Freedom Of The Archetype Chapter 3 Towards A Materialism of Cinema Chapter 4 After Ghatak

33

119

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

130

Notes

144

Introduction

When we return across the barriers of time to the work of an artist no longer with us, we have to somewhere acknowledge those barriers and state the means we have used to overcome them. If we consider for instance the historical circumstances under which the artist worked, we must face the question of how their relevance might extend to a changed present. Would the criticism isolate the artist? or would it enlarge upon his work ? Where, eventually, would we place ourselves within such a historical canvas defined around the subject of our criticism ? Established conventions of art-criticism often demand an objectivity, a mandatory distance from one's subject. I n such a form of criticism there is often a sense of passing judgement. But if there is one thing we shall not do here, it would be to'judge' RitwikChatak. I fan artist as enormously relevant to the present as Ghatak demands an objectivity, it is a radical objectivity, a statement of bias rather than a false neutrality. The relationship of the individual to the historical process, never insignificant, here becomes of overwhelming importance because of Chatak's own historical consciousness. The process of individuation through history, important in his films, here becomes as important for us as we move beyond false glorification and relate the individual to history. Nowhere better than in Chatak's work do we realise that if in India, thirty years after ourindependence, serious art is still considered the property of the upper classes, the issues go deeper than the one.s usually considered relevant for art and art-criticism. If the only response that the cancerous growth of our mass-arts evokes is the romantic dream of a 'better" art, it is obviously not enough to merely disagree or to challenge this dream. We need to identify and to confront the people who have sought to make even this dream into a commodity, the ideology that would systematically obscure, the issues at stake and concFetise an image only in its saleability.

A Return to the Epic

In bourgeois society one constantly faces a divide between a people's material level of existence and the dreams and aspirations that preoccupy them. One comes to a strange fragmentation of the human sensibility as their daily existence turns increasingly unreal and the only sensuous reality they feel is that of the dream-world which is provided by the mass-arts. The complete absence of an identity to people outside of the one conferred upon them by the dominant social tradition leaves them without an alternative but the few offered by the bourgeoisie, the few limited options that provide the system with a facade of democracy. It is a part of our fragmentation that the struggle of the artist for significant expression is often not seen as part of the larger struggle for a cultural unity. We repeatedly see how, despite an overall acceptance of a correct ideology, many of those who enter the struggle view the role of the artist as that of a mere propagandist Such a position, taken by those who mean well but who have yet to digest the lessons of socialist-realism, at times goes dangerously close to the position of the dominant class itself. Central to the present study on Ritwik Chatak is the concept of myth. At various points in the book differing shades of the concept have been used, with the idea that, hopefully over its length a definition of the term would emerge. One could begin with a simple idea of the myth as an encrustment of a particular configuration of ideas never challenged, a particular set of images that have come to achieve total acceptability within a culture-specific society. How is myth to be confronted ? It can only be broken if it is displaced, shown to be false in a context different from the one it brings with itself. Such a displacement, and the consequent openingout of the myth, we may term signification. The process of signification begins with, to use Brecht's-phrase, the 'showing up (of) the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators'. Since the very basis of a myth is its unchallengeability, it also carries within it the ideology of the dominant class, the'dominant viewpoint'. And since myth communicates predominantly on the sensuous, all significant form also has to work sensuously if it is to dispalce its basic content into conscious cognition. Mythic belief gets perpetuated in society through the dominant mass-media. And here in India one comes to the enormously vital role of the commercial film industry as the most potent carrier of myths. Nowhere else does the cinema appear to play the role it does in India drawing at once from the ancient epics and the modern pop

culture, creating a culture for the urban lumpen while mounting an attack on all other cultural traditions. Cinema is at once the main cause, and the most obvious of reflection, of the kind of changes that have taken place in our society in the last thirty years. It's forms of subjugation themselves reflect the history of colonialism in our country and the various ways in which it manifests itself today. We can see how the process of taking on myths becomes a larger and larger battle as the antagonistic forces become stronger. If the process begins here, as subterranean forms of exploitation are dragged into the light of consciousness, it culminates intheepic. Onemightdefine the epic in slightly wider context than the Brechtian and see the form historically as the rallying point of a class or, as it has been in the past, of even civilisation. Both myth and epic, forms which are in constant tension with the one closed, the other open-ended, are directly related to history. Both forms are comprehensible in terms of the tradition which they evoke. The difference is that myth seals off a configuration of images from-their material base, while the epic achieves a synthesis of form, a unity of perception that is the first step towards the overcoming of the fragmentation of our social sensibility. The attempt here has been to extend class-struggle to its wider, more all-encompassing form of a conflict of tradition. The width of canvas that will be obvious with the first chapter itself has been an inevitable consequence, as has been the attempt to extend the Chatak tradition to other filmmakers in stating a larger position outside of the dominant one. The emphasis on tradition becomes inevitable with Ghatak not only because his films work in a tradition, but also because of the man himself. We can recall the final scene in jukti Takko Ar Gappo where Neelkantha encounters the Naxalite youths. The way traditions move on over generations, the inevitable destruction of the past while building upon it, the violence of the dialectical position itself, all this somehow comes out in the last scene of Ghatak's own final film. Chatak's own terrible, and in a way almost heroic, end and his insistence that that too be expressed in his work, is a violent denial of the neat segregation of private and public seen in the lifestyle of most of our artists. It therefore becomes as important to recognise the context to Ghatak's work as to analyse its inner structures. As we recognise the significance of his form, we have to also see the way it emerged, against the barriers that our conformist intelligentsia force upon the independent-minded, as part of the struggle for freedom thatGhatak waged all his life.

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Ritwik Ghatak

The Backdrop: Partition

What the film really demands is external action and not introspective psychology. Capitalism operates in this way by taking given needs on a massive scale, exorcising them, organising them and mechanising them so as to revolutionise everything. Great areas of ideology are destroyed when capitalism concentrates on external action, dissolves everything into processes, abandons the hero as the vehicle for everything and mankind as the measure, and thereby smashes the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel. The external viewpoint suits the film and gives it importance.Berfo/f Brecht (The Film, The Novel and The Epic Theatre)

In 1947, the long-drawn nationalist movement finally won for itself the freedom of the country. For millions of Indians however, the climax of an essentially controversial movement was not the "Tryst With Destiny" that 15 August 1947 claimed to be, but the ensuing fragmentation of the country into three parts the tragedy of Partition and its terrible aftermath. Partition, and the communal warfare that accompanied it, were clearly a consequence of the disruptive forces inherent in the nationalist movement now gone out of hand. That it was essentially a result of the factionalism within the Indian ruling-class over the distribution of power, as it was transferred from British to Indian hands, seems obvious today. But for those who actually experienced the rapid escalation of petty political infighting into the splintering of socio-cultural bindings hundreds of years old, this appears far too simplistic an explanation of its causes. For the historian, the question of whether Partition was an expression of contradictions deep within the Indian social fabric, or whether it was forced upon an unwilling people by the nationalist movement and if the latter, how it could be done with such ease has to be faced. The sole event of Partition thus questions the very nature of modern Indian society, the complex tensions that tend to bind and to splinter it. The aftermath of the split saw the Terrifying spectacle of millions of refugees on either side of the new border uprooted overnight from their land of birth. One of these refugees was Ritwik Ghatak. With thousands of others from the East, he too made his way to Calcutta to seek his future. The raw experience of the event, particularly the overwhelming sense of loss on seeing his motherland suddenly turn politically alien, was etched deeply into his emotions; it is an obsession expressed repeatedly in his films as for instance by Bhrigu in Komal Gandhar: "I refuse to accept that land across

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A Return to the [pic

the river as a foreign country. I was born there, it's my land, I will go hac k there." The e x perie nee more orless shaped his entire oeuvre. It became for him so significant an event that he pla> ed ail his themes in its backdrop. Chatak remained convinced that Partition had not been historically inevitable but forced upon the people by the nationalist bourgeoisie. In this he believed that they found active support from amidst the Bengali lower-middle classes, who in factacted as catalysts of the split. This class, which had been the one to suffer the brunt of the war and later the ravages of the freedom struggle had, within its narrow enconomism and petty-bourgeois value-system, developed a vicious instinct for survival. In all his films except Ajantrik, Chatak's characters are drawn from this class economically deprived, but with definite bourgeois aspirations. He shows how this class suffered as much as any other in the trauma of Partition, but how even after this they refused to abandon their earlier values and aspirations. A sympathetic portrayal does not prevent a searing indictment of this class in his films. Partition was clear evidence of the extent to which the-dominant tradition held the country together. This tradition, now in nationalist colours, represented the ideology of the new classes coming to the fore in the wake of industrialisation and urbanisation. The nationalist ideology was turning increasingly vocal, not only in politics, but in the arts and, more importantly, in the evolution of the new swadeshi culture that was rapidly replacing the old colonial one. The fact that even the division of the country failed to shake the hold of this tradition really indicates the nature and extent of its dominance. In Ghatak's films, the all-consuming bourgeois aspirations of even the economically deprived class achieve major significance when played out to the grim backdrop of Partition and its memories. These are Chatak's refugees, the men who truly lack homes. The state of refugeehood was for him no different from the alienation of a class from its own traditions. For Chatak therefore, cultural rootlessness took on, not its usual ethnic or regionalist .character, but a class-character. The initial question of the split of Bengal was to become for him a larger quest an attempt at portraying the relationships between the new classes formed by the process of urbanisation and the machine-revolution, and their old traditions. It led him to take a look at the whole issue of

Refugees : Jukti Takko Ar Cappo

rootlessness afresh the search of the refugee for a new identity. For him this identity had links directly with the past, the centuries-old cultural heritage of our ancient societies wherein lay the unifying forces of the present. What within the present was a recognition of the material level of struggle, extended into the past to a recognition of the material traditions that once held the people together, traditions that had been destroyed over the centuries. These traditions were initially strongly Bengali as he wrote, " Bengal for the past seven or eight-hundred years has produced something that was essentiallyBengal" and elsewhere, "As I tried to master the tradition of the whole of Bengal, I felt sure that the union of the two Bengals is inevitable. I am not here to judge the political implications of this, but the cultural impact of this is of great value to me." But as Ghatak's work grew, the traditions it reflected grew too. As he sought the roots of the present in those traditions, he went directly counter to the ethnicity that many other artists, seemingly closer to the Indian 'essence', attempted to capture. Ghatak moved from the particular, using the significant in it, to a complex general, a nearinternational sensibility in his search. This is the dialectic that extends to make his work at once extremely rooted to his time and milieu and yet reflect a true internationalism of sensibility.

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A Return to the Epic

CHAPTER ONE

The Dominant Tradition

"Whatever the accidents, the compromises, the concessions and the political adventures, whatever the technical, economic or even social changes which history brings us, our society is still a bourgeois society... Several types of bourgeoisie have succeeded one another in power; but the same status a certain regime of ownership, a certain order, a certain ideology remains a4 a deeper level. As an economic fact, the bourgeoisie is named without difficulty; capitalism is openly professed... As an ideological fact it completely disappears; the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class that does not want to be named." Roland Bartbes.

The visualisation of selective absorption of the best of capitalism and socialism which is usually seen as the essence of the Mixed Economy was not an attempt at a synthesis in the dialectical sense, but one towards peaceful co-existence in the traditions of democracy. These traditions of truly participatory democracy were present in the very essence of India, the nationalists believed, and would surface as soon as alien repression on all that was.truly Indian would be removed. They hoped that the modern present, with its material advancement, would be integrated into the uniquely Indian character of its ancient social systems to show the way to the future. At the economic level thus, the programme was for an indigenous economy based on simplicity and austerity key virtues of those ancient modes of production, today symbolised by the charkha and the bullock-cart.complemented by a simultaneous drive for the'nuclear age'. What was this ambitious dream based on ? It was in fact the only possible manner in which the pre-lndependence nationalist promises, and the historical role that the nationalists believed themselves to be playing, could be integrated into a developmental programme for the country. Nationalism had come to India at a time when capitalist relations between colonies and imperialist powers was undergoing a major change the time when, in Lenin's words, the "old colonial power becomes the 'rentier' state or usurer state" and "cartels become one of the foundations of the whole of economic life"2. Colonial exploitation had escalated to the more sophisticated finance-capitalist exploitation with the entry of the non-colonialist superpowers like Germany and Japan into the world market; now in the colonies, the local bourgeoisie could be entrusted with the key capitalist function of expanding the vast, as-yet-untapped semi-urban and rural markets. Since there was on this score little ideological disagreement between the earlier and later ruling classes, it was heightened with often the help of imaginary issues. The basic need of the nationalist movement was one of evolving a unifying identity to the present distinct from the one given to it by the British. This led, in its earlier stages, to a significant rise in revivalist thinking. Historian Bipan Chandra, writing about the glorification of India's past by the nationalists, says,3 "Obviously its mainspring was a need for national identity and pride. What was unfortunate from the national point-of-view was that the past chosen for glorification was
*

With the coming of independence to India, one of the most typical nationalist movements of this century reached its goal as power was transferred from a colonial to a national ruling-class. At the time when Chatak came to cinema, the ideology that prevailed was predominantly nationalist, devoted to the process of'de-naming of the social class', and to the establishment of the naturalness and inevitability of nationalist rule. By the early fifties, the definition of progressivism that the movement had brought with it had pretty well been accepted at all levels. This was the heyday of the Mixed Economy, when the.pressure was to 'fit India into the nuclear age and do it quickly (but)... while learning from other countries, we should also remember that our country is conditioned by its past. All the factors that have conditioned India have to be remembered".1 Conservatism here constituted a refusal to recognise what in Nehru's words was the fact that "We are on the eve of something at least as great as the Industrial Revolution, perhaps something bigger" The ambition that dominated the new progressives was that, following the success of Gandhism during the movement, India might introduce to the world its most advanced mode of production yet

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Ritwik Chatak

A Return to the Epic

the ancient past This was partially true because of the fact that the period of Mughal rule was still fresh in the memory of the people and could not therefore be easily glamourised. On the other hand, the ancient past was remote, and known only through official or nearofficial texts..." According to Chandra, there were three main myths that the movement perpetuated: First of these myths is the belief that Indian society and culture Indian civilisation reached a high watermark, the Golden Age, in ancient India, from which high watermark it gradually slided downwards during the medieval period branded the period of decay and 'foreign rule' and continued to slide down till the revivalist movement made partial recovery but that the real task of reviving the past glory and civilisation still remains..." "The second mvtti arose out of the necessity to Drove that India of the ancient past the Golden Age had made the highest achievement in human civilisation. But this was obviously not true in material civilisation... Therefore the myth that Indian genius lay in spiritualism, in which respect it was superior to the 'materialistic' West.. The third was the Aryan myth, which was a copy of the AngloSaxon and Teutonic myths, andwhich was the Indian response to the White racialist doctrines. This was the myth that the Indian people were'Aryans' and that the'pure' Indian culture and society were those of the Aryan, Vedic period. Many of these myths had in fact been brought into direct political use by the British to demonstrate the unfitness of the Indians to manage the more mundane affairs of statecraft It had fitted very well with their earlier liberalism in trade, and that which accompanied their subsequent colonial takeover. By the time of the nationalist movement itself, in tune with the transition that took place within British capital, their liberalism also underwent a transformation. In the new position, justification for large capital investment revolved around the issues of poverty and overpopulation. And these myths, since they were directly instrumental in affecting the large Indian markets, found, as they still do, a synonymity of view with the Indian bourgeois

class, that has ever since continued to make inroads into the rural areas on the grounds of redressing natural resource imbalances. It must be mentioned here that a myth seldom answers to the question of whether it is basically true or not It's main quality is that it functions as a closed system of belief; as it relates in ever-declining measure to history its content itself gets blurred, it begins to lose meaning. By the end of the War, the new classes within the country that sought to replace the old colonial domination of the vast Indian markets with their own produce, were increasingly influencing nationalist programmes. This local class had tasted huge profits during the war and the years of Depression; now, with Independence in sight, militant nationalism was giving way to a more moderate phase, and the old myths were also being given a more practicable re-interpretation. Capital investment had to be de-linked from its Western stigma since that had earlier come under much criticism from the nationalists themselves; overall, there was a need among the new classes fora tradition that was in some way'lndian'. This was to a large extent the origin of the last of the nationalist myths the glorified Indian village. The village suddenly came to symbolise an independent unit that had somehow retained all the great traditions of India's past right through the colonial experience. Suddenly everything with 'folk' origins became a key towards a rediscovery of our national roots. The very primitivity of its production modes was linked to the .non-materialist alternative that India was supposed to offer the spirkually impoverished West. The very poverty of these villages was glorified as an essential ingredient of asceticism. As with the earlier myths, this one too had been introduced into political rhetoric by the British before the Indians took it over; tne picture of an Indian village where, for the poverty-ridden peasant" life was too near the edge of death, and his main concern was with the struggle to stay alive" 4 had been created by the British to denigrate the predominantly urban-based nationalist movement Now it served the new rulers, who were able to use this myth, with a few embellishments, to congeal the urban-rurai imbalance of colonial times behind a welter of distorted values while simultaneously pushing their.way into the rural markets.

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A Return to the Epic

We can now get a perspective to Partition, and the terrible communal war that accompanied it Bipan Chandra points out how the 19th century social reformist movement was accompanied by a significant increase in popular literature of the adventures of the great regionalist heroes of the past Shivaji, Rana Pratapand Guru Cobind Singh. This possibly gives us our first insight into the nature of heroic characterisation in popular art, in which myth is imposed upon character to create the larger-than-life 'heroic' figures that lead to fascist domination of sensibility of the audience. The nationalist conflict was often characterised as an epk battle, and political leaders as possessing many of the archetypal qualities of leadership and heroism of popular mythology. Consequently when the political schism occurred over the division of the country, it was possible to give it a communalist overtone by recourse to the same myths, with now the Muslims included along with the British as having jointly been responsible for the country's downfall from its Golden Age. This was countered by a Muslim revivalism as well, and with these false positions linked to the middle-class value-system, a communal war was easily whipped up. Since the myths themselves were never challenged, linked as they were to firmly entrenched middle-class values, communalism was itself explained away by yet newer myths, in which it was seen as having a centuries-old history, or by each community recognising a tradition of barbarism in the opposite one. The communal war was thus obscured behind a myriad of ethnic and regionalist issues, and Partition given an air of historical inevitability. The dominant tradition is thus evident as fundamentally based on ahistoricism, and embedded within a class-position. Myth piles upon already existing myth as historical events are dislocated from their historical perspective. The entire economic and state machinery of the present can thus b~e obscured from its actual function. It is possible to see how an event such as Partition can seem insurmountable, take on the shape of the major neurosis of an entire era As the events of May 1 968 in Paris and the Vietnam War obessed Jean-Luc Godard, so Partition obsessed Ghatak. We see in Ghatak's work how, when just one event such as Partition is sought to be explained, it yields a mythic complex as undefined laws of' nature' open out to the historical process. Often the myths are so large that they rival the epic itself in scale. Opening out such myths is often so far-reaching an act that to open them out is to.put human civilisation itself to the test

II
A major obstacle to the statement of a tradition outside of the dominant one is the weakness of our conservative tradition itself. It is a measure of its weakness that to overcome this tradition one has to first define it. Moving from dominant mythic belief to the traditions of mythic portrayal, it is important to identify its fundamentally romantic character. Whether it be the instinctivism that is used to explain away the acquisitive urge for commodities, or the particular regionalism that has been the usual expression of a return to one's roots, or more specifically the total dissociation, the schizophrenic rift often seen between the livingand working conditions of people, and the dreams and aspirations that dominate their value-system, such romanticism has been the means of explaining away the 'covert' materialism of human activity. This is romantic ahistoricism taken to its final extreme. But as Arnold Hauser points out, it is part of the romantic position itself: The characteristic feature of the romantic movement was not that it stood for a revolutionary or anti-revolutionary, a progressive or a reactionary ideology, but that it reached both positions by a fanciful, irrational and undialectical route. It's evolutionary enthusiasm was based just as much on ignorance of the ways of the world as its conservatism... just as remote from the appreciation of the real motives behind historical issues, as its frenzied devotion to the Church and the Crown, to Chivalry and feudalism.5 Such a wide view of romanticism becomes necessary for us because the most significant artists of even the dominant romantic tradition in the country echo its associations beyond its specifically Indian context If this tradition, in which the dominant mythic system finds its clearest expression, were to be split into two streamsthe first being the actual portrayal of ancient myth, the second the more recent realist tradition taken from the West we see in Ananda Coomaraswamy and, in cinema, in Satyajit Ray the tradition in all its wider ramifications. If we were to examine their work in slightly greater detail, we might also see the reason why romanticism was so important a phenomenon in the way It affected Ghatak's work. The influence of Ananda Coomaraswamy on the specifically

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A Return to the Epic

Indian traditions of portrayal is hard to exaggerate; but it is also deceptive. This is possibly because, coming to the scene when the national situation was in complete flux, Coomaraswamy's two major targetsthe Western academic system, and to a lesser extent our own brahminical tradition that had encrusted the past into-meaningless ritualwere both ripe for a larger attack. Whatever the reason, Coomaraswamy has since been almost completely absorbed into the ideology that has sought to detach our mythic tradition from the material conditions that first gave it expression. Coomaraswamy, perhaps unaware of its repercussions, was the first major theoretician of a position that has grown today to beinga major problematic for any Indian artist who would attempt to draw forms from the past Coomaraswamy's work comes as an attempt to rescue the magnificence of oriental art, and its entire mythic system, from those who would render it mystical or criticise it for its non-realism. Western academic art-criticism, which has always missed the significance of a tradition by concentrating on its conventions, is entirely representative of the capitalist milieu from which it emerges where the'worth' of a work of art defines its innate qualities. Both come under scathing criticism from him. In a series of devastating essays, he is capable of showing up European developmentalism for what it was in the coloniesin its educational policies, its attempts to 'civilise' a backward but not necessarily uncultured peoples by imposing upon them a foreign literacy and cultureand the destruction of all ideals of a oncedignified civilisation by a 'murderous machine with no conscience and no ideals' that is contemporary Western civilisation. The destruction of a people's art is the destruction of their life, by which they are reduced to the proletarian status of hewers of wood and drawers of water, in the interests of the foreign trader whose is the profit,..We are irresponsible, in a way that the Orientals are not yet, for the most part, irresponsible.6 This context becomes important in the light of Coomaraswamy's real attempt to outline as an alternative to capitalism a way of life he draws from the ancient oriental past In its concept of responsibility, of 'the cosmic pattern of good form unanimously accepted' and mainly in its recognition of attainment in the work of the anonymous artisan, these ancient oriental systems offered the most significant alternative, he felt, to the present

At the very centre of Coomaraswamy's vision of the oriental society is the anonymous artisan. It is through him, through the art he creates in his anonymity, that we see the fusion of what forms an almost unbridgeable gap in capitalism: that of labour with art. Part of this vision comes through his recognition of the distance between use and beauty in modern, machine-produced goods. But in main his advocacy of the return to the artisanal mode of production is because it is only in that, in a skill born out of a function higher than paid labour, that the truth in art is perceivedthe achievement and truth in the 'well and truly made object'. The substantiative strength that Coormaraswamy draws from th( ancient traditions to make these statements comes from its myths. Along with his recognition of their sensuous power, both symbols and ritual-patterns in his work move beyond their brahminical context, and achieve a strength that parallels that of the myths themselves. A typically forceful interpretation of a powerful myth is as follows: Shjva is a destroyerand loves the burning ground But what does He destroy? Not merely the heavens and earth at the close of a world-cycle, but the fetters that bind each separate soul. Where and what is the burning ground? It is not the place where our earthly bodies are cremated, but the hearts of His lovers, laid waste and desolate. The place where the ego is destroyed signifies the state where illusion and deeds are burnt away: that is the crematorium, the burning ground where Shri Nataraja dances, and whence he is named... Dancer of the BurningGround. In this simile we recognise the historical connection between Shiva's gracious dance as Nataraja, and His wild dance as the demon of the cemetery.7 It is through such insights and descriptions that Coomaraswamy revalidates the forms of the ancient myths, rescuing them from both the Western skeptics and the brahminical class. As earlier, here too he arrives at what seems an almost materialist recognition of their vitality through his interpretation of the symbols of creation and destruction expressed there. But again the last step is never taken; the very expression of.such powerful symbols becomes pure creation as Coomaraswamy wonders at the kind of artisans that must have given birth to such images:

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A Return to the Epic

How amazing the range of such thought and sympathy of those rishi-artists who first conceived such a type as this, affording an image of reality, a key to the complex tissue of life, a theory of nature, not merely satisfactory to a single clique or race, nor acceptable to the thinkers of one cen'tury only, but universal appeal to the philosopher, the lover and the artist of all ages and all countries.8 History for Coomaraswamy was contemplation of the past detached from its specifically historical perspective. He always accepted the privileged position of the present in observing the past, but did not consider the present as different in any way from the mythic past. One sees this in the way he never sought substantiation from specifically historical sources. Myth became the absolute centre of his universe, for if to him opening it outinto history was to miss out on its true significance as myth, likewise extending its inner structures into a programme for the present was something that would naturally occur, but only when the myth was comprehended. The job of leading to such comprehension is specifically that of art Art is "both an aid to, and a means for spiritual progress", and consequently all art that does not reduce itself before larger attainment, upon which intrudes the artisf s personality, is suspect, faulty art Such a world-view is one very close to a large number of Indian scholars and thinkers. Many of these represent the very best of the Indian critical tradition in the arts, for Coomaraswamy's tremendous concern for the manner in which the myths and symbols of India's past were losing their vitality to mere ritualism, has later led to others in his tradition breaking away from the decadent classicism of many of our art-forms into a recognition of its folk origins. It is in fact a very simple job to be critical of Coomaraswamy for he himself offers us the toolshis justification of the caste system, of sati, his advocation of a return to feudalism; or the other orientalist E. B. Havell glorifying the poverty-ridden Indian peasant in iust the tones that bourgeois nostalgia has used since Independence are positions easily condemned. But that would beto criticise the individual by lettingthe tradition go. We have to see the consequences of this tradition upon mythic portrayal itself. In her study of Coomaraswamy,9 Geeta Kapur introduces the analogy of Thomas Mann. Mann, an almost exact contemporary of

Coomaraswamy, is one of the few modern artists the latter refers to, when he quotes him at the conclusion of his essay'A Figure Of Speech or a Figure of Thought: "I like to thinkyes, I feel surethat a future is coming in which we shall condemn as black magic, as the brainless, irresponsible product of instinct, all art which is not controlled by intellect" She points out that Mann in fact achieved the very thing Coomaraswamy soughtan integration of the mythic past into the modern sensibility. Assimilating Freud, Mann follows up in a succession of his works, the relationship between disease and creativity and thereon, tier upon tier, he discloses the wizardry of the unconscious; the contrivings of the soul in its attempt to seize the world; the irony, comedy and transcendence drawn from the roots of the soulits mythic past And this passage to mythology does not in any way deny the psychological. Such a passage to mythology led Mann not to orthodoxy or to any specific tradition, but towards being a 'visionary modernist'which Coomaraswamy cannot be said to be. One may extend the analogy by seeing how an artist from the realist tradition, the tradition that Coomaraswamy rejected in his discovery of a new oriental aesthetic, used the myths and archetypes of the past towards a portrayal of the present In a sense the crisis of the bourgeoisie, Mann's'search for bourgeois man' in Lukacs' words, is the same as that of Coomaraswamythat is if we extend the distance between use and beauty to also express the ever-widening gap between a people's existence and the images of modern society that dominate modern consciousness. This, for Mann, is the fragmented sensibility, against which he soughta unified vision. In Doctor Faustus, to begin with, the attempt is to develop this purely through the narrative structure. Then, as the character grows, this too extends to the man-nature relationshipthe growth of the rationalist and his struggle against the 'daemonic'. If the struggle to express a collective unconscious does come, it begins as an entirely individual attempt to reconcile the idealism of the pre-war German tradition with the increasing crisis it faced after the war. To see how Coomaraswamy was unable to universatise, we would need to determine the terms of this universal isation. And here it is that

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Mann's solution is extraordinarily revealing. The attempt to relate the protagonist as an individual in an environment gives way in his later work to the reader directly experiencing the vital relationship with nature. But even this is not allhis universalisation comes when his narrative develops realist and mythic counterpoints, as in The Black Swan, or moves to mythology proper as in The Transposed Heads or The Holy Sinner. In the latter, with Freudian knowledge of the true significance of myth, pure narration is itself enough to open out the myth. As we counter Coomaraswamy's use of mythic forms to creafe a closed system with Mann's attempts to open them out, we are at the point of actually defining the means by which archetypal forms achieve freedom from their ritualistic bindings. Such a freeing of archetypal energy we might describe as the process of politicisation, or to use Mann's word 'secularisation' of the archetype. One could, perhaps somewhat simplistically, outline it.thus: there is, to begin with the crisis that challenges the dominant illusion thatall communication takes places purely on the conscious level. Coomaraswamy's crisis would be the distance between the religious icon and the useful object; Mann's the one following the Freudian onslaught upon the conscious. As the dominant sensibility suffers fragmentation, the new sensibility seeks to bring forth its own synthesis with the past, and to create new images of the archetype. It is here that the term'secularisation' is important, for in many ways these new images have been attempts to take the archetypes out of their feudal context. Perhaps it was Coomaraswamy's basically feudalist position that prevented him from doing what Mann, or in our own context Ghatak, did. And finally, as the new images seek to intervene in the material process of social functioning, as people discover in them an expression of their own struggle, it is then that they take on a revolutionary quality. Coomaraswamy's own idealism, his propagation of the nationalist cause in his rejection of the modern and his own response to the crisis that dominated his timeof a rejection of capitalism without seeing a significant alternative to it all possibly explain his obsession with myth as myth. While such an aberration might appear to have been caused by his overstatement of his case, it is in fact not that. It is fundamental to his ideological content, as it is to that of the dominant classes of his time in the country.

It is almost solely a consequence of such a position that a neo- < brahminism has returned to Indian art and the only'genuine' Indian forms are believed to be non-realist and decorative. We see constantly how as folk forms (which are considered low art) are absorbed into the dominant tradition, they are drained of their earthy context and ritualised, just as our traditions have been ritualised for so many centuries. Coomaraswamy had sought in his life to break down the barriers between art and ritual, to see in ancient ritual an artistic significance. His successors have followed in his footsteps by doing precisely the reversethey are converting the live traditions of today into rituals.

Ill
In 1955 Satyajit Ray made Father Panchali and turned a new chapter in the traditions of Indian art The controlled intensity of the film, the structuring which made it the breakthrough in realism that the postcolonial sensibility had sought from the turn of the century, has continued ever since to influence Indian filmmakers. For the new sensibility fighting for a self-respect against the derogatory misconceptions widely held about Indian art, realist portrayal of man in his environment had proved, like all modernism, a major hurdle. This was overcome in Father Panchali in the manner in which it extended the lyricism of Tagorean literature to cinema But more than that, the true contemporariness that the film reflects is in its ability to sustain a motif over so vast a canvas as the Apu Trilogy. The near-epic sweep of the Trilogy, in its ability to conceptually space out over the entire country, was something very new to contemporary Indian art The success-of the film, its somewhat unexpected fusion of the Bengali lyrical tradition with the neorealist style, was to elevate both traditions to new strength. The film appeared to resolve an emerging contradiction within neorealism itselfbetween its ability to signify the everyday, and the limitation of realist typage. The contradiction can be seen in De Sica's work for instance, where even that master of typage was unable to sustain its power of Bicycle Thieves to his later films. Father Panchali, in using a different tradition of lyricism, offers a way out of this impasse, which was what Cesare Zavattinni perhaps acknowledged when he said 'Ah, the neorealist cinema the Italians did not know how to make' when he saw the film.

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After the enormously detailed and carefully executed com posing of the Trilogy or Charulata, to then make a reference to Ray's subsequent work like Abhijaan, Nayak or Aranyer Din Ratri, is to indicate the limitedness of the breakthrough. Even more than Ray's own work, it is the realist school, which is what passes for'serious' cinema in the country and would like to claim its inspiration from Ray, that indicates the utter bankruptcy of the realist tradition in India. It is obvious that the contradictions go deep, perhaps into the very traditions that dominated when Ray and the subsequent filmmakers worked. One would have to consider the tradition of Western realism itself as possibly the origin of these contradictions. The crisis of realism is in a sense a manifestation of the crisis of romanticism itself. Realism, as it originated in the 19th century in Europe was, in Ernst Fischer's words,10 a[) aesthetic in which "every object becomes an objet a" art" To be a tragic hero is no longer a privilege reserved for kings and grandees; rather anyone merchant, artisan, day-labourer is found worthy of tragic treatment With its discovery of the grotesque, with its revolt against the complacent banality of the bourgeois, romanticism elevated the figures of the social periphery... over and against self-satisfied virtue and surrounded them with the nimbus of the heroic- infamous. The crisis then emerged with the rise of the critical-realist writers who, as Fischer writes, "analyse bourgeois society with clear-sighted negation, sympathise with any resistance to it (especially by individuals) but are nevertheless incapable of perceiving a social perspective. They hate and despise the bourgeoisie without being able to see an alternative...". The logical conclusion to this school is the "total, despairing, issueless negation of Samuel Beckett, this great writer without hope or mercy". The proximity of the realist crisis to our time, and especially the fact that almost every contemporary artist is at present struggling to achieve significant form by transcending realist limitations, increases the magnitude of the problematic However, as realist conventions are themselves undergoing changes in use, the tradition indicates just how any formal breakthrough is gradually nullified as it gets absorbed by the dominant class. In the latter phase of the realist movement, the gradual draining of

the synthesised cosmic view that is so obvious in the work of the great realist masters results in the form getting increasingly encircled by a mythic closed system. There is the emergence of the decadent classicism that always raises its head towards the wane of any progressive movement in the arts." The form is then believed to be usable for only certain established, defined ends. Realism is for instance today defined by subject certain subjects are considered 'realistic', others not And nowhere is this better evident than in our 'art cinema where realistic films are only those which deal with subjects like poverty, village life or slums. For some years after it was established as an art-form, cinema did not reflect this crisis in realism, perhaps because the expressive possibilities of cinema in accentuating reality regenerated the realist tradition itself. Griffith for instance took off from Charles Dickens in many of his pathbreaking inventions like the close-up, parallel cutting, use of bit-players etc. The amazing ability of cinema to capture real images in motion formed the basis of cinematic aesthetics; but while on the one hand this was used by the great Soviet masters as a means of stylisation, on the other it also gave rise to the myth of the photographic image. The myth of the autonomy of the photographic image comes through its ability to portray reality so convincingly that all formal considerations appear irrelevant. For some filmmakers this characteristic is seen as the genius of cinema, its verisimilitude in capturing images; and so we have John Grierson making a passionate case for use of the documentary qualities of cinema, since only in them is the medium vindicated. This position finds its main theoretician in Siegfried Kracauer, whose Theory of Film makes a strong case for a'redemption of physical reality' through cinema, by making use of its unique qualities of capturing nature 'in the raw\ But that position has been a mere offshoot of the main use of the photographic image, which is in the mass-media Around the characteristic of the individual photo-frame to capture an image with a transparent truthfulness, there has come to be defined a narrative structure that is also considered truthful, realist A narrative structure that contradicts the directness of the photographic image, or which, orchestrates the elements of cinematic communication to an end not necessarily the direct one, is considered subversive and violative" of its innate genius. The truly realistic film therefore, within this tradition, is one that can substantiate this illusion of truthfulness by juxtaposing it

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over a larger image of truthfulness fhat is held by popular viewers. So films like The China Syndrome or Z which impose their image of an inner verisimilitude over a larger political canvas become completely 'realistic' because here an internal mythic structure coincides with a larger mythic structure of the dominant social system. It is easy to see the reason for the shifting of ruling-class control from social and religious institutions to control of mass-media at just the time of the arrival of cinema. It is possi-ble to now link the power of the cinematic image and its sensory domination of the audience with a larger political weight. If in literature the final resting place of realism can be seen to be in popular art the romantic, peripheral hero in thrillers, Ibsenite naturalism in commercial theatre in cinema it has undoubtedly come to rest in 'third-world realism'. If Beckett's work is a kind of epilogue to the realist tradition in literature, then in cinema this is provided by Jean-Luc Codard who took documentary-realism to its logical dead-end by filming his own camera in La Chinoise. This act, a repetition of Dziga Verto\/s experimentation with silent dpcumentary in 1926, freed Codard, and possibly Western cinema as well, from its realist bindings. No serious filmmaker will take on a naive realist stance today except in a 'popular7 sense. In the 'third-world' however, no filmmaker can move outside realist convention, without facing the terrible risk of being branded 'elitist'. Let us with this background consider the breakthrough of Father Panchali. It's fundamental link with the neorealists, apart from its conventions, comes from the humanism that both share. Neorealism was able to bring significance to daily, mundane acts and contemporary events by showing them through new eyes, through the heightened awareness of mankind gained by the experience of fascism. In its conventions it was a restatement of the cinematic experience that had first been visualised by Eisenstein and the other Soviet filmmakers in a very different context In both traditions, the context was all-important Ray's context was very different from the neorealists, and this instantly permitted him to do much within the form that the latter had been unable to do. The purely lyrical passages for instance, like Durga's dance in the rain, are new to the form itself. Likewise, the almost archetypal qualities the Tagorean tradition saw in nature, reflected in Pather Panchali, were an extension of realist compassion to near-cosmic dimensions.

But the particular manner in which the Western audience saw this is interesting. Let us see one review of the film that appeared in French of the film: 12 Even the poverty and misery never become ugly; it is as if Ray has plunged below its surface and found a timeless purity. And this without any aesthetic affectation; seeking always the essence of a landscape as of a human being. It is a world without sin, a rejection of all heaviness of spirit, or of mediocrity of the soul; something which is both paradoxically surprisingly sensual and strangely spiritual. A childhood world of enchantment where evil does not exist, at least not in - the manner in which it does in the West This is clearly an India not unfamiliarto the West, the mythic vision of the' timeless p u r i i / and the 'world without sin', present from the time of the German Orientalist tradition in the 19th century, and later captured by Kipling and Forster, appears to have been sufficiently strong for even a work of the sigaificance of the Apu Trilogy to be absorbed within that, despite all the evidence in the films to the contrary. If one were to now be critical of Ray, one can point out that the epic is never achieved unless it overcomes the innate mythic system of its content It either opens out the myth or it becomes the myth. The difference between Ray and the neorealists may now be seen as in the one case a forceful confrontation of the dominant mythic system and in the other a peaceful coexistence with i t In Rossellini, for instance, the war as an experience is used for various ends to examine characters and relationships; it is a mythic backdrop examined in itself but also used to create and break down barriers, and as in Stromboli to even lead to religious coversion. Such a constant probing, always a major part of dialectical representation, is missing in Ray, who always seems to accept a tradition for what it is. Perhaps the point would be made if he were in this respect compared, perhaps somewhat unfairly, to R. K Narayan. Narayan too, a very passive recounter, is acceptable to the West; in him too is a lack of violence, a refusal to forcefully displace a mythic system. Both share the passivity that is for some reason associated with the orient, and while at its best it can bring forth the grand design of the Apu Trilogy, at its worst it is a kind of pygmification of culture, a receding of self before the all-pervasive big brother that is the dominant tradition.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Freedom Of The Archetype

In discussing the work of Ray, one must remember that one is discussing possibly the finest example of the genre that has been described here as 'third-world realism'. It is the lesser filmmakers like Shyam Benegal for instance whose work indicates the specifically imperialist character of the tradition. If imperialist control through media is seen as a double-edged one, a high-pressure commercial cinema hacking its way into newer markets finding ideological justification for doing so through a different kind of'art' cinema that would whitewash its destruction upon the native traditions, one can see the role of a filmmaker like Benegal in the latter function. Benegal, in using a kitschy version of analytic-dramatic realism not only furthers all the myths held by our bourgeois class about their own and other traditions, but also develops a vicarious link with Western mass-art itself. The one justifies the other while the other perpetuates the first. The point then to which this entire section seeks to lead is to demonstrate how a work of art, if it does not actively displace the mythic system that has taken hold of its content, is itself absorbed into the system. In doing so, the attempt here has also been to outline the perimeter of the dominant mythic system in particular in the context of our subject, Ritwik Chatak. As we realise how our arbitrary conventions may be revealed in a broader political light, we also see the levels at which a great work of art has to actively oppose these conventions, the system they represent. Sergei Eisenstein, in stating these levels, borrowed from Nterature the terms Dramatic, Lyric and Epic. Our own use of the narrative, figurative and epic must really be seen as part of the Eisensteinian structure which has been taken as a fundamental one in this study. In moving to the work of Ritwik Chatak, as we recognise how a work of art confronts increasingly largerand more complex mythic systems in its growth, until in the epic form the entire dominant tradition is taken on, we also recognise the first principle of the Eisensteinian epic: that of art as revolutionary praxis.

"The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically" lean-Luc Godard

:..

In 1952 Ritwik Chatak completed his first film, Nagarik. He had started, and had been forced to abandon, another film the previous year named Bedeni. Nagarik too, though completed was made under almost impossible conditions with crippling shortages of stock, equipment and finance. The evidence for this is plain to see in the film itself prints existing today have been salvaged from an almost decayed negative that was found on a laboratory shelf. I n the context of Nagarik, we must focus on a significant gen re of the time, a genre we might name IPTA-realism (after the Indian People's Theatre Association, which influenced it). Films belonging to this genre were eitherdirectly financed by the IPTA, like K. A. Abbas' Dharti Ke Lai, or in other ways belonged to the same general position. The broad influence on them was socialist-realist, but today one can see other characteristics to their work, characteristics emerging not from their conscious position but linked to the temper of the times in which they worked. Independence brought major changes to the urban milieu; mass migrations, skyrocketing land-rates and a fundamental transformation within urban commercialism with the arrival of North Indian businessclasses, all had vitally affected the big cities. The commercialism of the war-economy and Partition, when large sections of the pronationalist ruling-class made enormous financial killings, still dominated after independence, because the largely speculative character of commercialism never really gave way to more solid bourgeois systems. All this brought forth the characteristic of an underdeveloped bourgeoisie a garishness of display, an opulence specifically designed to contrast with the poverty surrounding it As the new businessmen took over the entertainment media by the mid-fifties the earlier studios had been wiped out by the new entrepreneurs, a

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large majority of whom, seldom stayed on in the business for over a year" the very nature of mass entertainment underwent a change as the gaudy values that characterise the commercial cinema today came into being. In such a milieu, documentary-realism achieved its own significance, the vitality of the form coming through a realist portrayal that conflicted against the increasing insularity of our middle-classes and against the mass-communication that reinforced this insularity. The I PTA-influenced films were the first in the country to use the ability of the camera to move out of the studio towards any constructive end. Their work glories in location-shooting (Dharti Ke La!) or the use of nonactors (Chinnamul). Beyond this however there is no resemblance between these films and the then contemporary neorealist movement in Italy. The difference was partly one of purpose. The Indian filmmakers, in the tradition of the I PTA which had been formed, when instituted in 1943, with the specific intention of using cultural forms for massmobilisation, made their films with a specifically propagandist intention. The Telengana insurrection of 1 946-51 had at its height brought about visions of the Independence movement itself being carried forward into fullscale revolution. Following this vision, the work that emerged from the IPTA was mostly part Of a definite programme for mass-mobilisation, where men like K. A. Abbas were expected to make use of their contacts in the film industry to ensure wide distribution for their films. The second difference, the one more basic to our purpose, was in the degree of comprehension of cinema as an art-form. The films he re never really broke away from the. tradition of mass-communication, often in fact reinforcing the latter position despite a seemingly radical theme. In most of these films Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar being a clear example there is a splitting of two almost incompatible traditions, represented in their work in documentary and fiction. The shots of the canal, of the disease spreading, are reduced to nothing by the stock characters of heroism and villainy. The extension of the realist aspect into an overall structure in Andre Bazin's words, the recognition that" realism in art can only be achieved in oneway through artifice" is never evident. In its later films, this tradition betrays all the limitations o*f socialist-realism, and in some cases gives strength only to reactionary forces Mehboob Khan drawing foi instance from the glorious hammer-and-sickle tradition to what end

one only has to see Aurat and Mother India to know. It was nevertheless the decisiveness of their approach that must, in 1952, have attracted Ghatak when he made Nagarik, for Nagarik seems to be quite clearly within the IPTA tradition. Ghatak had been associated with the I PTA almost since its inception, and had been part of their troupes moving from village to village in the Bengali countryside through the forties, a period he documents later in his Koma! Gandhar. Telengana had had a major impact on him, and it seems to be clearly the optimism of the time, particularly against the background of the decade of frustrating and ineffectual struggles in the IPTA, that led him to filmmaking and to Nagarik. The film shares many characteristics with the I PTA genre, but in some" significant ways differs from them, and these are important in the context of what Ghatak was to do later in the cinema The film is about an unemployed youth named Ramu, who comes from a middle-class family that has been turned refugee overnight by the Partition, but which nevertheless refuses to abandon its pettybourgeois aspirations. Ramu gets saddled with the responsibilities of running the household, tending to his aged parents, getting his younger brother an education, his sister a husband: The film chronicles tjie slow destruction of this family as its resilence is beaten out by its hopeless situation. As the host of hurdles grows, the family is forced to sell its house, overcome its inhibitions and move to a working-class neighbourhood. The milieu is Calcutta, the filthy, garish metropolis to which thousands of refugees came every day in that terrible period, hoping to somehow eke out a miserable existence. The environment in the film is as significant as is the story or characters, an ever-present, inescapable backdrop. In fact, this is the first expression of the relationship that is the most basic to his subsequent work: that of the characterto the natural, and contrasted against this, the urban environment The city, the phenomenon of urbanism that through Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha grows to archetypal dimensions in his portrayal alienated relationships within the urban milieu, something that first finds expression in Nagarik. The significance of the house, for instance, and the struggle to retain possesion of it the equating, by the mother, of this struggle with the struggle for existence itself is established from the beginning. The large house that they once possessed across the border which they had to abandon, and the embodiment of Ramu's dreams in a little

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Nagarik

picture on a calendar, these contradictions in relationship that indicate the refusal of the family to abandon their petty-bourgeois aspirations are the ones that permit Chatak to link them to the filth and garishness of the urban milieu. The house constantly gives way to the all-pervasive environment of the city. The influence of the city itsehf hangs heavy right through; and Chatak colours his characters by resonating realist conventions of portrayal against the less tangible portrayal of the milieu. The overall sluggishness, the desperation seeping into the characters forms the point of departure for the 'take-off in the end. The two major characters that bring about change, Jotin Babu and

Uma, are both.created by the milieu. Jotin Babu, who stays in the little space below the staircase, is the first to bring in the sense of impending doom when his wife dies of starvation. This comes as the first of the major reversals as the pathetic level in the film escalates. Uma, who is the only person to possess a freshness, a genuine potential to bring about change amidst the desperation that engulfs Ramu, herself gradually fades away, loses her vitality. The change in Uma suddenly becomes evident at the point when her sister Shefali turns a prostitute. The individual reverses become increasingly violentculminating at the point where Ramu walks out of the house in a fit of anger against his father, and returns to find the father dead. The heightening of this violence only isolates the individual, intensifying the indifference of the environment'indifferent nature' whose significance we shall see in all Ghatak's films after Ajantrik. At a certain point in the narrative Chatak introduces Sagar, the paying-guest. Initially Sagar is entirely defined from the viewpoint of the familyemptiness, the eternal hope that in a month things will be better, suddenly gets highlighted bytheentry of thest range rand the anticipation that he might somehow change their lives. The hope that an outside force brings to them is devolved into him paying rent; the conservative justification for an action, so palpably false in the lives of middle-class people, once more gets underlined with considerable violence. Ceeta, Ramu's sister, demands of Sagar that he rescue her from this trap. There are several reversesJotin Babu's warnings, Shefali's prostitution, the death of the fatherand each brings the passivity of the environment in sharper conflict with the characters. As Geeta and Sagar fall in love, while using realist conventions Ghatak is in fact shifting gear and closing in on Sagar who has been portrayed only through the other characters. SagaKs shocked disbelief at the demand that he take Ceeta away thus echoes through the film, a reversal that is life suddenly bursting forth through the deadening surface of convention. And finally, the point of transformationthe acceptance of the inevitability of the class-struggle. It is here that the single major intervention comes in of the filmmaker, the playing of the Internationale in the background as the family leaves the house. There is nothing to justify the optimisim with which the family faces the future, but there is a lightness in the air, a new confidence. They are all

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w
together, even Sagartheir unity is emphasised by the anonymity of the new owners as they come down the street. The basic relationships, between character and environment, character and author, the stretching and compressing of realist conventions to new meaning, all are evident in their beginnings in Nagarik. From the vast pan-shot in the beginning that introduces Ramua shot Chatak was in later work to raise to a rare grandeur and evocativenessto his m/se-en-scene m the house, the attempt to overcome the limitations of realism is seen in the way Chatak moves to a specific struture of signification that anticipates much of the more sophisticated realist cinema in India after 1 952.14 Where the film seems to limit itself is in the nature of the intervention, if we define the realist form as Brecht would outline it.15 Realist means layingbare society's causal network/showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators/ writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society/emphasising the dynamics of development/ concrete and so as to encourage abstraction. we can see how if Ghatak's attempts were of the same direction the width of the realist framework in its great works of art is missing. The main limitation of photographic realism, as the realist image extends to realist narrative, realist characterisation, and eventually even to conscious realisation taking place in certain very defined terms, has been the refusal to acknowledge the compositional aspect of form. Nagarik in this context is important in its recognition of this, seen in the manner in which it moves to an orchestration of character, environment, structure of portrayal and intervention; the ensemble, to use a word from Eisenstein. And it is precisely such an ensemble of portrayal that Chatakestablishes in more complex manner inAjantrik. The plastic of the silent cinema used to vibrate. Just as a silent face on the screen could speak, in the same way an image could also resonate. Most often the note of sonorousness has been perfomed by the landscape which is the freest element in the film, liberated from the tasks of narration, and the most docile in transmitting the emotions, the sentiments and the state of the soul. In one word, all that which in its fluid figuration is hardly seizeable and which cannot be emphasised except by music. Sergei Eisenstein ('The Music of the Landscape')

As we move to Ajantrik, the tale of Bimal and his wayward car, we come to traditions that have remained almost entirely unrepresented in modern Indian art with its realist preoccupations. The use of nature in purely musical terms, going back in its reference to the silent Soviet cinema, goes back much further in the Indian tradition in establishing a complex interrelationship between conventions of human portrayal and of observing nature. The encounter of the tribal culture with a machine itself echoes the clash of a tradition many centuries old with one that has existed but a few decades, but grown to a strength and ruthlessness unparalleled in history. For most of this century, our rural neo-feudalist and urban rulingclasses have been ruthlessly expanding their hold over the Indian countryside. Their use of imported technology, not for all-round economic growth but only to increase existing disparity by creating highly concentrated pockets of production and consequently an extreme concentration of economic power, has culturally resulted in sections such as the tribals undergoing traumatic experiences with their first encounter with the machine. The inability of backward rural sections with a strong alternate culture to relate to the concept of machine production made them particularly vulnerable to the invasion, leading to large scale and often overnight proletarianisation and to the scene of some of the most violent and cruel acts of the new ruling-classes. Ghatak appears to have been acutely conscious of the gulf that separated him from his subject by this cultural barrier. The investing

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Bimal : Ajantrik

The mocking townspeople : Ajantrik

of a false character to tribal culture, even by their sympathisers, has been a major factor in prepetuatingtheir exploitation. Even the liberal or 'humanist' sections, not devoid of the romantic influence, have inevitably taken a non-materialist stand while attacking such exploitation; the sympathetic view has usually been to control the rapaciousness to preserve the tribal culture as long as possible. The very camera that defined the relationship between Chatak and his subject has been a vital technological instrument in the hands of the rulingclass in furthering economic colonization. The problem for Chatak extended directly into the issue of realism. In the film he moves to a more direct narrative in a decisive breaking down of conventional relationships between character, environment, author and audience. This directness permits him, as he comes to grips with the structure of exploitation embedded within the social system, to elevate the contradiction to its most expressiveto the clashing of contradictory forms. From the very beginning the relationships within the film achieve significance: the one between Bimal and his car, Bimal and the rest of the townspeople. Ghafak uses the car, Jagaddal, which is capable of emotionssulking when he is preoccupied with something else, responding joyously when he lavishes attention on itas the basic dramatic device to open out Bimal's world. It is not only his car to which he responds with such passion; he is at one with the whole of nature. The very landscape comes alive to participate in his moods. The rest of the townspeople, the beggar, the fat woman, the Sikh taxi driver, never tire of poking fun at his eccentricity.

These are the basic, conflicting relationships. They extend to othersbetween Bimal and the young bride who has eloped with her husband, and who communicates the same childlike impetuosity as he does the first time she rides the taxi. With great glee she points to a tear in the roof of the ear, with the same enthusiasm demands of her husband a comb that has taken her fancy. Through these relationships comes the most significant one; between Bimal and the Oraon tribals. The tribals are never really defined, they never intrude upon the dramatic plot But they are in a way an extension of Bimal, possessing the primordial identification with their milieu that Bimal seeks through his cara material level of existence. , And finally, the rroiseless isolation of the entire townshipa certain subtle intrusion on the horizon. The townpeople mock and jeer at Bimal, but the mood of slapstick and exaggerated gesture within the town is contrasted with what is happening outside it. jagaddal, even the other cars in the town, are very different from other machines that enter the frame, machines that behave differently. There is the train, always the steady workhorse, a powerful machine entirely'tamed' by civilisation. In one shot the train is shown moving over the bridge, a steady, rhythmic, precise, above all reassuring machine in its power and as the train goes out, the camera pans down to the dried riverbed where we see our jagaddal weaving an erratic course. There are the trucks, the overhead construction trolleys, the railway points, even the well with the more modern means of hauling up water. There is always the feeling that even as the townspeople carry on their relationships with each other, they are nevertheless getting systematically isolated by the steady invasion of the countryside around them. At the end of the film, Bimal's spluttering, exhausted taxi breaks down again and again. But he is determined to get it back on the road, just to show off its resilence to the mocking townspeople. His failure introduces us for the first time to the new business classthe trader who buys the car for scrap. This event comes as the climax of not only the main narrative but also of a series of parallel narrative structures which extend its significance beyond the dramatic. The film from the beginning splits the conflict stylistically: Bimal's world viewrepeatedly conflicts with realism. As Bimal's way of looking at the machine and at nature comes against the more familiar conventions, what we have always believed to be universal patterns

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The invasion of the countryside : A/'antrifc

of perception now sharply stand out as conventions, not laws. For the tribal, as Ghatak has once pointed out, such animism is a natural response, and if for the audiences the only familiar machines are the train and the trolleys, we can now link the realist conventions that portray them thus with the role they have played in our countryside. Ghatak uses this conflict here not so much to define an alternate realism, but as a stylistic departure, by means of which he can reveal his organising logic in counterpoint to it. The romantic pathetic fallacythe belief of life in the inanimateis here used against the romatic position. And it is this contrapuntal approach that gives him his main tools to sculpt his characters. Bimal is clearly splintered into different contradictory revelations in his relationships. The romantic extension of human emotion into nature is here reversed as an ensemble of perspective, evoked through the unification of various fragmented realtionshipsthe car,, the children, the townspeople, the tribals, the countrysidecome together to define the individual sensibility. Thus the false unity of bourgeois characterisation, the unidimensional relationship with nature, breaks down as various elements, passive in analytic-dramatic cinema here suddenly come alive with their own narrative forms. The smaller outer fragments of the ensemble are introduced like the young bride, for instance, who drives in the car to the guest house. As she, her faceless husband and the trio of Bimal, the car and the little boy travel, elements of a joyousness are gradually introduced with naturethe vast plains, the trees, the water; in the courtyard as the woman claps her hand in sheer joy, the little boy and the car share it as it reaches a crescendo. The little boy driving^agadda/ round the courtyard, and the circular movements emphasised by the overlapping shotsall this is suddenly shattered by a violent cry from Bimal who only just prevents the car from running over the woman. There is a long silence; everyone is sobered down by the nearaccident, but in fact the mood has broken down into their predetermined relationships. Such a shattering of mood comes repeatedly, as the ominous signs break through these moments of a oneness with nature. Later in the film when the bride re-enters, forlornher husband has left herit is only an extension of such destruction. Bimal leaves the woman at the railway statidn, but they can never share their earlier togetherness. The moving shadows of the train compartments thrown on her, and later of her impersonal hand extended to take the ticket from Bimal,

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Bimal is obsessed, hypnotised by the tribals. The relationship culminates in his return journey from the railway station. The shots of the journey are taken with tremendous vigour, with overhanging trees, winding roads all intruding directly into the dramatic. Half-way through the journey he hears sounds fFom the valley. He stops, is almost magnetically attracted by them and goes down the mountain. There is the shot where he is shown in silhouette raising to his lips his pot of liquor. The structuring of the shots is now entirely musical, with the rhythms of sounds, of body movement, of tonalities, synchronising into complex montage.
The runaway bride : Ajantrik

which he, running desperately trying to catch up with the train, passes to heralready indicate how the machine has now become functional for.her, how the gulf has widened. The other, more complex fragment is the Oraon tribe. Their relationship to Bimal is sensuously suggested through various ways, mainly musically. The sounds that the car makes are for instance later recognised as coming from Oraon horns. There are also visual associations established, like one shot where, as Bimal's car passes in a cloud of dust, through the dust is suddenly visible a tribal procession, always characterised by their high-flying, striped bairakhis. This is immediately followed by another where the procession emerges from below and moves away from the camera. Bimal's encounter with the tribals takes place just once but indirect encounterssome of them hiring his taxi and the shot of them helping him push it back to townabound in the film.

The tribals : Ajantrik

Ajantrik

Ajantrik

And again there is a shattering of mooda fight takes place amongst the tribals over someone who has ill-treated a girl. From this sequence onward the structure widens, jettisoning realist narrative into a stylistic take-off. The car finally breaks down and Bimal sets out to prove everyone wrong and to repair it He works all night, and in the entire sequence of the car-repairing Chatak breaks completely from realism. The black-and-white contrasts increase, and the virtually life and death struggle is emphasised with the symbol of the crucifixion, introduced only through the use of camera movement and lensing. The shots conflict Bimal with his milieu, isolate him in his garage, open out the interior with a strange backdrop where we see a series of crosses, and at one point so detach from the bindings of narrative as to have a tribal woman kneeling in grief before a cross. By this point narrative itself as a linear structure has been transcended, in its illogicality this structure is reminiscent of the leaping lions in Battleship Potemkin.

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film to a universal experience. Jean Piaget has shown how animism forms a major part of the developing of the childhood sensibility before the world of a child gets fragmented by his ability to distinguish between subject and object, and the mainly internal nature of thought, his attitude to realism is entirely distanced from the objectivity of the adult Of the common experience that the film seeks to establish outside of realism, Ghatak writes The child fantasising about the bogeyman, the aborigine imagining God, the tribal seeing the train for the first timeall these come from what we may describe as a law of life.
Ajantnk

There are a number of visual allegories, particularly the final shot where after showing an exhausted Bimal going off to sleep, the camera shortens focus to showa little mouse burrowing into the earth. At the end, when Bimal sets out to show his 'new* car off to the mocking townspeople, it refuses to climb the hill and lurches to a halt. As the car rolls downhill, all the shots of nature are replayed in exactly their earlier sequence of the drive from the station, but now slowly, without their vigour the trees look down unmoved, the plains below the valley are passive, lifeless. Before the arrival of the trader even, the associations are complete and the takeover of the new class is heralded. Chatak points out some of the allusions in the fragmentary relationships thus, "Mad Bullake is his avowed extension, and the dancing.Oraon trtbals his sublime extreme. Piara Singh (the Sikh taxi driver) is the strong-minded as opposed to the tender-minded Bimal. The mud-throwing children are an extension of the image of Bimal and at the same time the symbol of cruelty in the life of the poet". All this, by itself possibly meaningless, achieves significance because of what Chatak leads up to: he points out thaf'The character of Bimal is archetypal". With Thomas Mann one saw the importance of the narrative in establishing new images of the archetype. It is through the establishment of a larger base in common experience, which comes through the restoring to a work of art its multiple levels of communication, that such images surge forth. The animism of Bimal, while emerging through the tribalsamong whom, Chatak writes, such responses are a part of culture, seen in the film in their use of the bairakhis is extended in the

It becomes the manner in which one responds to the unknown by recallingatradition of perception in which the unknown is itself a vital part of existence. In such a culture, asC.G. Jung writes, "the goal of its

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interest does not seem to have been how to understand the real world as objectively and accurately as possible, but how to adapt it to subjective fantasies and expectations.16 As we come to grips with the archetype, while we shall not stray too far beyond Jung's definition that he draws from ancient myths and symbols, we should nevertheless hav"e to see how images in art move beyond the merely figural and take on a universal affectivity. One of the greatest archetypes of cinemaChaplin's Gentleman Tramphas been sketched out from very recent historical sources. We see in Chaplin how an image drawn from a dominant mythic system as perhaps little more than caricature, rises to the power of the archetype when its pathetic affect eventually moves beyond the lyrical. Chaplin's use of the visual narrative, of the gesture as music, of the mask, all these clearly establish the close link between the narrative structure and the universalising of experience. The specific tradition of the narrative in Ajantrik comes from the Soviets. Eisenstein's description of narrative not 'unrolling' in the naturalist principle but a 'colliding of attractions', and its relation to pathos (he defines the term very differently, in its original sense), finds direct use in Ajantrik Eisenstein spoke of pathos as a guide to the spectator, an affect determined by the author's pathetic relation to the phenomenon recorded as well as the manner of that recording. The simplest form of this is when the spectator identifies with an individual character on screen; here imagery coincides with structure, the character starts following a rhythm 'scintillate at once with forms and turns of speech that are poetic in nature'. The structure becomes' more complex when identification goes beyond man, radiating into surroundings and environment, as in Shakespeare's Lear. Here phenomena are arranged, flow 'ecstaticall/. And this is what achieves its highest form when the phenomena develop relationships among themselves, the point when 'each seems a transition of one intensity to another, from one dimension to another'. The direct influence, of course, comes in the way nature is used as part of the ecstatic flow. The mist scenes of Potemkin leading to the mourning of the dead sailor, the parallel narrative documenting the changing seasons in Pudovkin's Mother, these form the direct antecedents of Ajantrik. As Ghatak confronts the realist position with his structuring of the alternate sensibility, one recalls Eisenstein's

definition of art materially as the intersection of nature (organic form) and industry (rational form). The extension of the pathetic fallacy to the machine through Bimal is an attempt to reconcile the main symbol of modern culture with a more ancient one; Bimal's failure, and the receding, indifferent nature in the end^ raises contradictory forms of perception to contradictory mythic systems by establishing the link between such forms of perception and the actual material forces at work. If Ajantrik does not actually relate such perception with its history - for that we would have to wait till Meghe Dhaka Tara it at least establishes the quality of the ensemble that goes into the making of a significant image. The liner narrative is temporally broken up through the creation of motifs, through replaying shots which suddenly achieve a significance of their own, but mainly through the way Chatak gives it a spatial dimension with his shot-framing. From the first shot that introduces Bimal, where we see an enormous church bell that takes up the entire screen, to the rock striations that reintroduce the bride, and every shot in which the landscape intrudes, there is the attempt to shift importance from the individual protagonist to the milieu that defines him. It is the historical petrificationof dominant structures of perception that we see here, that gives rise to the exploitative archetype which Chatak portrays in his Meghe Dhaka Tara. The conflict in that film moves beyond Ajantrik and shows the nature of ritualism in the archetypal form the rituals that from the basis of conventions that harden into inflexible rules and the vital fullbloodedness of the human form that seeks freedom from it

The trader: A/antrik

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III
"If one is consciously trying to lead an image to its conclusion, that does not make up the archetype at best it can create an allegory. When some images develop as an inevitable consequence and again become inconsequential in the process of turning into symbols, it is only then that the archetypal force is born." Ritwik Ghatak "If only women could be set free from the artificial fetters put round them by men, we could see on earth the living image of Kali, the shameless, pitiless goddess. I am a worshipper of Kali, and one day I shall truly worship her, setting Bimala on her altar of Destruction. For this let me get ready. "The way of retreat is absolutely closed for both of us. We shall despoil each other; get to hate each other: but never be more free" from Rabindranath Tagore's Ghare Bhaire.

If in Ajantrik the enemy was on the horizon indistinct but ominous, in Meghe Dhaka Tara the clash is direct This is Chatak's first concerted attack on the romantic bastille, and the conflict takes place at every level at which the film works. A criticism of a tradition as it plummets into decadence becomes for a significant artist as much a self criticism as that of the society in which he lives. As he portrays the tradition, he puts himself up to the test as well, reeling under the blows he inflicts upon.his characters, hoping that the confrontation between antagonistic traditions would somehow move to a level of significance. In this battle individuals often do not count, it is the work of art whose permanence is the more significant, as is its ability to grow and to intervene in the terrible conflict of opposing traditions. For a 'Marxist/ who can think of no reason for art outside of its function as propaganda, such agony of creation is considered bourgeois self-indulgence. For people who ladle out 'propagandist/ or protest' art and themselves keep distant from the struggle for new means of expression, criticism of society i.e. of those in power is always a simple matter. Like the bourgeoisie these people use existing, dominant forms and increasingly insist on art being experienced on the purely conscious.

As we come to Ghatak's most crucial film, the film that marked the turning point for him, what becomes evident is the revolutionarv aspect of the returning to the form a fullness, a totality of perception and experience that has been drained away from it by the dominant tradition. More than any of his other work, Meghe Dhaka Tara depends upon purely sensuous portrayal in its evoking of the conflict of traditions, Sensuousness as something that consciously reverses petrification of form, is itself a fundamentally political act, and the struggle for its articulation part of the revolutionary struggle. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, sensuous portrayal counters the abstract, providing a constant two levels of experience. They are not always parallel levels however; the sensuous constantly pulls into abstract mythology as the characters are entrapped by their past, and releases out as an affirmation of human vitality. But as we see in the film, even abstract mythology, however parasitical and closed a system, has to work sensuously as well if it is to perpetuate its hold on the social value-systems. Therefore, like the form-content distinction that Chatak fights right from Nagarik, he also fights the particular relationship between the sensuous and the abstract He does this by making the conflict itself his content, drawing his formal structure from the manner of its own forms of exploitation. And finally, the constant tension between thesensuous and the abstract also offers us the way to experience the film itself; here more than anywhere else because of the specific significance given to this tension in the film. When Chatak spoke about'some images developing as an inevitable consequence and again becoming inconsequential' it was not onlythedominantimages withinthe film thathe meant but also in our own conscious perception of the film itself.
**

Chatak once described the experiencing of all Works of art as that of imbibing various levels of rasa: Rasa gets fused at different levels in all art-forms depending upon the perceptor. A man enjoys rasa depending upon his ability of imbibing rasa.

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Take for instance films. At the primary level there could be a story of laughter and tears, of joys and sorrows of life. If we go deeper, we find directions, depending on the philosophy and consciousness of the artist If someone goes even deeper, the temporal feeling cannot be expressed in words. At that moment he reaches the doorstep of something unknown, unknownable. We may use this to introduce ourselves to his Meghe Dhaka Tara. At the primary, i.e individual and contemporary level, we have the story of .the family and Chatak's reference to the Partition backdrop. Neeta, our protagonist, is at the centre of the story as she trudges day after day to support the other members. In the very beginning of the film we seethe characters as Neeta encounters them on her way back from work: her brother Shankar, the young singer practising by the stream, sister Geeta, the flightly young woman, brother Montu practising his boding, always more interested in amusing himself than in shouldering responsibilities, her hard cynical mother and old father Tarun babu. There is Sanat, the serious bespectacled student, Neeta's suitor. Neeta cannot marry, having the responsibility of providing for her family. Her responsibilities only increase with every misfortune as the father loses his legs, Montu has an accident but the most shattering moment comes when her sister Ceeta draws Sanat away from her with tacit encouragement from the mother, and eventually marries him. With little in life to look forward to, Neeta trudges away until she finally comes down with TB; her end, in a sanatorium, sees her fulfilling her one desire in life, that of returning to the hills. This is the basic dramatic level in the film; however, even in experiencing only this, we experience elements of the complex structure being woven in. The giant tree, the stream of water, the other bits of nature that suddenly widen into the vast hills of the panoramic shots in the end, all are strongly etched into the narrative even at this simple level. The courtyard, the symbolic yagna-mandap, is also made significant at the dramatic level itself, Mke the dissolves from Neeta's facial close-upontothecourtyard, or the vast circular shot of Calcutta that cuts into the narrow space. The romantic element, so powerfully eyoked in the rabindra-sangeet sequence Oe raate more dwaar-guli), is violently spilled over irrto the characterisation and reversed, as with Tarun babu.

Meghe Dhaka Tara

The dramatic is a vital level to Chatak's structuring. It does not, as convention would demand, give way to the more compleV interpretation; it is instead woven into the more complex level so that there is a constant receding and dramatic intervention that extends to its form the struggle of the human with the archetypal. As we move deeper yet, we see the human character as itself a product of social forces. The woman in society is characterised at birth by the primordial images of womanhood, images that have now got fused into the entire system of social functioning. \nAjantrik itself, the discrete entity of human character was broken down; in Meghe Dhaka Tara this becomes more precise as the woman protagonist is split three ways. Going beyond Neeta, it extends to the other women as well, so that the mother takes on the cruel aspect, the one with the most tenacious grip on life. Geeta is the sensuous female the woman, asC. G.Jung describes in the social anima, who'feels where a

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man thinks'. Neeta, the third, is the nourishing force, the provider, the preserving and nurturing heroine. This division is central to our still feudalist social anima; it is the fragmentation of the creative outlets of the woman. When a woman takes on the role of all three, she becomes a towering, super-human force, corresponding then with the enormously powerful archetype of the Great Mother, to use the term by Erich Neumann. As the archetype takes over the character Neeta getting increasingly trapped into her role as provider there is a receding of Neeta's individuality; her happiness comes only through the satisfying of other people's desires. Montu's shoes, Geeta's new sari, money for Shankar, the constant demands made on her by her mother, her satisfaction in fulfilling these is really her life and her reason for turning down Sanaf s offer for marriage. Neeta struggles through the reversals and setbacks of the family, so that each might achieve what they desire Shankar becoming a famous singer, Montu getting a job, then his accident and finally his survival through an expensive operation. When eventually her need is no longer felt by the family, she is sacrificed; in the end, as her tragedy becomes universal we see the archetype going beyond Neeta, as the individual in her desperately cries out her desire to live.
**

dominating the human psyche to the very present In the modern period, however the means by which to draw from those forces has always posed a serious problematic. From Chaplin we have seen that images in art that aspire to the power of the archetype do not necessari ly refer to the same sou rces of the dominant archetypes, viz ancient mythology. Nevertheless in their affectivity they seek to rise to comparable dimensions. Of Chaplin's character on screen, Ghatak himself, bringing out its archetype strength, says, (Chaplin) is mythology incarnate for he is not the citizen of any country. The whole essence of life is filled in the hopeless, frail body of this man. This small man is the representative of all the deprivation and sufferings of a class from the day humanity became civilised, that is, when class distinction took place. We see through Chaplin how a figure that may have very recent origins in its own creation can resonate across traditions and evoke the entire history of class exploitation. This position gets further defined in Eisenstein's work. Eisenstein's use of nature-shots as'musical composition' does not remain merely lyrical; in Battleship Potemkin there is a linking up of the elements of nature air, water, earth, fire with the vital role they inevitably play within the myths of Universal Creation. Eisenstein orchestrates this role into the growing revolutionary consciousness that the film portrays. These natural element are gradually introduced at the time of the mist-sequence, in indistinct contours of grey. But they suddenly crystallise in the stillness of the dead body under the tent by the quay: They meet in the immobile image where the grey veil has become a tent, the black bodies of the ship, the crepe of ribbon of mourning; the water, the tears of the women with bent heads; the mist, the softness of the contours of the shot without sharp focus where the earth becomes the body that lies on the steps of the quay. Jt is here that intervenes the as-yet scarcely audible theme of the fi re. It intervenes in the form of the moving flame of the small candle in the hands of the dead sailor, to erupt in the flame of anger at the meeting and to become like the flaming coals of the red flag

But now for a brief widening of the contours of discussion on the archetype. What are the exact forces harnessed ? Where do they originate ? In a sense this has been a perennial concern of all art, though it is today expressed in very different manner from that in the ancient past As we return in time to that past, where so many of the images dominating our collective unconscious were first articulated, we also come to periods when art was not so distant from religious ritual, from its attached metaphysics and mythology. We also come to certain forms that found expression then the tragic and the epic. Both were vital to the confrontation of the ancient societies with the unknown, and in that sense central to the very existence of the collective. The Greek theatre for tnstance had achieved so complete an expression of the. archetypal forces that both Freud and Jung returned to it to identify and name those forces, which they saw as

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hoisted from the mast of the mutineers' battleship. Starting with a vague, imperceptible sensation of sadness of the mourning in general, the movement progresses towards the real victim fallen for liberty. From the melancholic surface of the sea towards the ocean of human sadness, from the trembling flame of the candle in the hands of the victim across the masses in mourning towards the rising of the entire city.17 Jung constantly reiterates the enormous significance of these elements of nature in various forms in the 'universal and inherited patterns' that, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious. Their importance is evident in the role they play in all ritual. Here we see Eisenstein displacing them from their ritualism so that the enormous creative energy that the demythologising process releases is linked to the creativity in revolutionary consciousness. There is a theme that Chatak had envisaged as a possible screenplay that Kumar Shahani narrates. It is based on the ancient legend of the Kumar Sambhava: In the orginal, the celestial couple, Siva and Parvati, lived in a state of eternal coitus. In order that the sperm of Siva may fertilise Parvati, it was necessary that they be disturbed by a cosmic shake-up. In the film that Ritwik Chatak had planned, Siva and Parvati were to be a peasant couple, permanently separated. The birth of the child was not possible until the feudal status-quo was overthrown in the villages of Bengal. Towards the end, as the peasants converge to the city, the couple would have their child.18 In this theme, the use of myth comes close to that of Potemkin in the way it seeks to release mythic energy towards growing revolutionary consciousness. It permits us to establish certain common cpncerns between the apparently vastly different traditions that operated in Ghatak's time from the ones used by Eisenstein. As one considers Chaplin and as we shall do later Bunueland Fellini, the process of abstraction of elements from mythic configuration and their sensuous reiTTcatTon into revolutionary structure, is seen as not only a common attempt, but also the one used to overcome the culture-specificity of myth and arrive at an international sensibility. Eisenstein has yet one more lesson to offer in the same essay he

also speaks of how he has used two other structures of far more recent origin in Potemkin, the 'chase' (in the meeting of the Squadron) and the'triangle' (in the Odessa steps). Within a dominant mythic system it is possible to see a conglomeration of myths from various epochs. Such a system forms veritably a parallel historical documentation, one that Tylor described as possibly'more uniform than histor/. Consequently, openingout this mythic systam necessitates a likewise joining of the past with the present, the need for back-and-forth reference. To refer only to the present, is to limit oneself to strictly realist portrayal; to move back only to the past is to move to revivalism. This is what is demonstrated by Eisenstein in the way he brings together structures as recent as the analytic-dramatic school of cinema, and as ancient as civilisation itself,

Meghe Dhaka Tara

The three-way division of the female principle achieves its full significance when its mythical overtones are realised. In a long essay entitled 'Myth and Ritual Chatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara' Ira Bhaskar outlines the mythic dimension in the relationship thus: The female principle of Shakti is a fusion of Jagadhatari, the benevolent image of the eternal giver, and Kali, the malevolent, destructive aspect This duality is the keystone of Hindu cosmogony and Heinrich Zimmer has succinctly summed it up, "The creative principle and the destructive are one and the same. Both are in unison in the divine cosmic energy that becomes manifest in the process of biography and history of the universe"

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Pointing out how Neeta takes on the symbol of the benevolent aspect, she writes, A prevalent story about the genesis of Durga is the concept of Havyagni (oblation to the sacrificial fire). In the ritual of the Havan (the act of consigning the mortal offering to the sacrificial flames) is symbolised the surrender of human desires and aspirations which are carried to the heavens with the smoke. It is believed that Durga was born out of this smoke as a transmutation of human desires, taking the form of jagadhatari, the universal sustainer. One of the central images associated with Neeta is the courtyard wherein are centred the ambitions of the rest of the family. Montu's desire for football shoes, Geeta's craving for a new sari, Shankar"s need for money and an emotional base to nurture his ambition, or the mother's incessant carping to sustain her family are the selfish aspirations poured into the courtyard, the symbolic yagna mandapa, from which manifests Neeta in the role of the Provider and Creator. She then points out how this archetype leads on to its conclusion: Legend has it that Durga spends five days at her father's house (on earth) and then returns to her consort Mahadeva. The enactment of the immersion process to the strain of holy chants and folk songs 'Come Durga, come to me' is the ritualistic deconsecration of the Durga image. The return to the elemental state is thus achieved by destruction. The Baul song (which evokes the ritual of the immersion of Durga and thus foreshadows the end of Neeta herself) in this context tecursand the various points in the film which contribute to the destruction of Neeta: when Sanat hints that he cannot wait very long, Geeta's marraige, the discovery of TB and finally when she leaves her home. The camera closes in on Neeta's rain-drenched face and the association of the immersion with the regenerating rain is obvious. From this close-up, Ghatak cuts to a shot of the hills. Through destruction, release and regeneration have become possible. She also explains the extension of the mother into the archetypal Kali: Associated with the hearth and the sound of the boiling rice, the (mother) is the titular head of the family. Unable to fulfil her

Meghe Dhaka Tara

Meghe Dhaka Tara

responsibilities brecause of her decrepit husband, she preys upon Neeta to keep the hearth going. Thus she perpetuates the image of Chandi, feeding upon life to sustain life. Threatened at the prospect of Neeta marrying Sanat, she thwarts their relationship by tacitly encouraging Geeta's flirtations. When the fathef objects to the marriage of Geeta and Sanat, she retorts "What will you eat if Neeta goes?" Oblivious to Neeta's agony, she prepares for the impending wedding with all the enthusiasm of a bride's mother. STie does not even balk at the blatant suggestion of a life of continued sterility for Neeta, also a daughter. In taking the tatter's gold bangles for Geeta, the mother also destroys any illusion of fulfilment in love and marriage that Neeta may have harboured. The realisation of the destructive, militant Kali image is complete. In the tragic form, it is through the experience of the fate that the protagonist suffers that meaning is reasserted. Life affirmation is linked with life-perpetuation. Neeta has been sacrificed _o that others might live; the fact that others like her too may be sacrificed is hinted at in the end of the film. At one level the film attempts to elevate the human conflict to an experience of this terrible life-cycle. But Ghatak seeks not only an allegorical portrayal, he attempts to also open it out This he does by exposing the ritualism of the myth, by playing it out to its end but, in doing so, suddenly raising it to the tragic. in outlining his'rasa' theory of levels of appreciation of art. Ghatak has gone on to describe this as in a way similar to'rituals'. "At the primary

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level, the question is of wordly transaction with the gods; on a deeper level the same thing becomes transcendental". This statement comes as a glancing reference to the way brahminical ritual has today become so symbolic of how we look back to the past; behind it, in Chatak's work, is recalled the entire history of assimilation of archetypal images into dominant consciousness. The Cod-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right, and therefore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously...from this the naive-minded person Concludes, rightly or wrongly, that the figure produced exists in and for itself, and he is inclined to assume that it was not he who fashioned it, but that it fashioned itself in. hima possibility whrch no amount of criticism can disprove... The naive intellect cannot help taking its autonomy into account and putting the dialectical relationship to practical use. It does this by calling upon the divine presence in all difficult or dangerous situations, for the purpose of unloadingall its unbearable difficulties upon the almighty and expecting help from that quarter. In the Dsvcholoeical sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the god-image. (C C. Jung):9 Such a cultural hold comes through the mass-arts that use the archetypal image that is significant. That is the first step towards its being drained of even its earlier reverence and made part of'worldly transaction'. The gradualelevation of the archetype to near-fascist control of the collective psyche is the entire process of the creation of rrTyth in society taken to an extreme. Such a cultural hold comes through the mass-arts that use the archetypal forms to further the domination of the ruling-class. The creation of the archetypal hero, the foreshortening of the tragic experience by distancing the spectator from the moral issues involved while portraying the clash of good and evil with all the panache our commercial cinema displays, all this provides active means for the externalisation of the archetypal images. The particular nature of the cathartic affect now is not one of moving to a higher emotional plane, but of externalising, of pouring out repressed tendencies into the archetypal embodiments of good and evil in the hero and villain. I n the victory of the good, which completes the ritual,

status-quo is emphasised as never before; catharsis itself takes on a consumerist quality, imbibed the way mass-produced goods are imbibed. The power that images often attain in this way is evident if we see the Great Motherthe very archetype that Chatak usesrise to its towering form in Mehboob's Mother India20, and in a different way become the procreator of cosmic forces in Deewar. From the very beginning Meghe Dhaka Tara inverts the dominant conventions of archetypal portrayal. In the very first shot, Neeta comes from beneath the enormous fully-grown tree, emerging, as it were, from the natural forces themselves. Introduced with the elements of nature that symbolise the principles of fertility and the mother, Neeta is in a way introduced as an archetype.

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just as the myths tell us that human beings were descended from trees, so there were burial customs where people were buried in hollow tree-trunks... If we remember that the tree is predominantly a mother-symbol, then the meaning of this mode of burial becomes clear. The dead are delivered back to their mother for rebirth. (C. G. Jung) This conglomeration of (mother) symbols is also found in the birth of Aschanes, the first Saxon king, who grew from the Harz rocks in the middleof a wood near a fountain. Here all the mother-symbols are unitedearth, wood, and water. Solt is onTy logical that in the Middle-Ages the tree was poetically addressed with the honorific title of ' L a d / . (C. G. Jung)21

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But this archetypal dimensionunlike in commercial cinema where the birth of the hero or the separation of twins is accompanied by a raging storm to indicate the cataclysmic nature of the eventis here used instead to heighten the ordinariness of Neeta. The archetype, which she in dominant terms represents, is really seen as larger than her, which in fact is seen to envelop her into its ritual as she trudges to fulfil her responsibilities. The archetype defined in terms of three women is itself a reversal of the usual means of elevating characterisation beyond the individual through its use. As the film progresses, the entire milieu begins to look as if it is set for some kind of gigantic ritual: the little copse, with the trees and the water, where Shankar practiseswhich is also the scene for the meeting of Ceeta and Sanatthe street leading to the village where the grocer sits, the house, the courtyard in it, and surrounding these, indistinct as one observes it beyond the railway line, the city of Calcutta Within each of these, Chatak builds up certain sequences of events that are reversed in the end. The motif of water, introduced in consonance with Shankar's singing, initially creates the encircling, protective background that is made concrete in the protectiveness of Neeta It has the freshness thatis again expressed through Shankar's raw, as-yet untrained voice. But this very same milieu becomes flat, barren, when Neeta later meets Sanat The water is now a muddy pool, shallow and lifeless. As Neeta walks down the path, she encounters all the members of the family one by one. Each is immersed in his own ritualShankar singing, Montu practising, his boxing, Geeta always involved in herself, the mother working in the courtyard. In Ajantrik Chatak had replayed a sequence of shots to very different and contradictory effect; here he establishes certain associations with certain sequences that later on get signified through mere reference. Neeta

walking down the path, in long-shot, then seen in close-up from a slightly above eye-level angle looking down on the water, this becomes gradually imbued with such meaning that another girl walking down the same path, which Shankar mistakes for Neeta, comes as a genuine shock. A certain sequence thus develops its internal ritual-quality, and the interweaving of daily ritual with larger ritual becomes in the film a direct formal extension of the interweaving of the dramatic with the lyrical. Of the use of the courtyard as the symbolic yagna-mandapa, Ira Bhaskar's essay offers a vital insight. It is really the place where the archetype takes on its larger-than-life dimension, moving beyond Neeta. The selfish ambitions of the family are poured into the courtyard, from which manifests Neeta in the role of the provider; it is also the place where the realisation of the mother rising to the destructive Kali figure, comes and where also takes place the ritualistic deconsecration of Neeta in the taking away of her gold ornaments. A woman's gold-fS(ree-dhan) is considered her rightful possession, her only asset in the world. To take that away is to negate all future for a woman. Chatak inverts this ritualist use of the courtyard within his dramatic structure by actually using it as a mandapa for offering thanksgiving prayers for Montu's survival through the operation. As the brahmins sit around the fire and mournfully intone their plight, describing themselves as mere servants of Cod humbly carrying on His duties, the presence of Neeta, a victim of the very rituals created by the brahminical class, serves to give a vicious humourto the situation. It is further emphasised when this withdrawal from the earlier complex ritual is counterppinted by an extremely forceful return to it at the point where Neeta tries to run away from home.

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Meghe Dhaka Tara

Framed against the doorway, looking out into the courtyard as the rain fall's in torrents upon it, Neeta raises her face and smiles. She unconsciously duplicates the precise effect of the Goddess Durga. It is the final point of the ascendence of the archetype. The main feature of Durga, her captivating, mesmeric eyes, are referred to at points in the film through the use of the whites of Supriya Choudhur/seyes in extreme close-ups. The first significant reference comes when she walks down the stairs after seeing her sister in Sanat"s room, and to the whiplash-effect the camera moves lower and lower as it elevates her while sharply cutting her off at the neck. This is later emphasised still more during the rabindra-sangeet, when the camera takes a virtually vertical shot of Neeta's face from below, raising her to iconic proportions. This elevation comes gradually, at precisely the points when she loses something significant that had belonged to her. The earlier

shotsof Neeta, Montu and Ceeta meeting Sanat on the park bench, for instanceare taken from a top-angle, dwarfing all the characters. The first significant departure comes during the 'Working Peoples' Theme' when Neeta walks down her office stairs, and the camera comes in from a very low angle. Towards the end, when Neeta gets TB, she is seen increasingly emaciated, constantly in the dark. When her mother comes to ask her what is wrong with her, the camera reverses convention by keeping the listener instead of the speaker in focus. The slightly angled topshot, when Neeta meets Sanat by the water, once more is used to highlight her emaciated look. As a consequence, the tremendous full-bloodedness of the image of Neeta smiling, hair loose, comes in sharp contrast to Neeta's own individual portrayal; it possesses an almost mask-like quality as the image superimposes on her suffering. Luis Bunuel's Nazarin an important influence on Chatakhas a famous dissolve that works to similar effect in suddenly establishing a larger archetypal image to the individual character. This is when the camera moves from the priest's face to a large picture of a laughing Christ, and on the soundtrack we hear screams which are later seen to come from child on the road. Such a juxtaposition of image takes place because the larger reference is used incounterpo/nt with the individual, unlike mass-art which fuses the individual-heroic with the archetypal. Chatak's splitting of individual from the archetypal exposes the exploitative aspect of the latter; the creative and destructive principles, at one level manifested in the Jagadhatari and the Kali, at another also get linked to the tendency of the archetype to free and to bind.

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The conflict between the two recalls another scene in Nazarin, when the priest, pushed to the limit of his endurance, says with the greatest effort, " I forgive you, but for the first time I find it an effort to forgive." As the culture that has ritualised our socially dominant archetypes while draining them of their initial material significance, itself grows to an increasingly pervasive hold over individuals in society, the archetypes grow as well to take on therr fascist domination. Their lost significancewhich forms Don Nazario's quest in Bunuel's filmtoday gives rise to images that are mere caricatures, shells of their original vitality. The basic unexpressed tendencies that were once concretised in these images are today further suppressed by them as they only perpetuate human bondage.
**

death of people possesses a life-assertiveness, all brings a new dimension to the old tragic experience. The tragic form in Gorky's Mother achieves a certain overall relevance to its time that it has perhaps never possessed in the entire bourgeois period. What we can see within the post-Marxian period is a very different synthesis of structure, in particularly its relation to the material struggle and towards revolutionary consciousness. With Ghatak one arrives at the point where this is assumed, and the structure moves beyond mere synthesis and recalls the tragic from itself in all its complexity. Ghatak, coming to art in the wake of the Soviets, Brecht and the neorealists, is able to take the movement beyond the realist type itself in his historical delineation of character and arrive at the archetype in his form. The first point about Ghatak's use of the tragic is, in Kumar Shahani's words, that He has freed the form from the classical supernatural and later romantic individualistic concepts by replacing Hamlet's 'particular fault' by socio-historical forces.22 In this light, we could now observe the transformations that the form has undergone in its use of the chorus, the 'rigorously worked-out inevitability of the scenario' (Shahani), and finally the exact nature of the redemption and the reassertion that takes place at the conclusion. The direct chorus starts with the Baul song which evokes the entire legend of Durga; it is later followed by snatches of Bangladeshi folk songs calling Uma back to her home. But this is only part of a larger chorus; to understand his use of the choral form we would have to begin with the melodramatic form and his use of the sound in the film as chorus. The use of sound begins with the introductory track itself, in accompaniment to the titles. In it is encapsulated the musical narration of the events, about to take place. This narration, which introduces some of the key musical motifs of the film, coheres different dhuns to sensuously convey the depths of the tragic experience to follow. Like the chorus, which first conveys the dimensions of the tragedy to the audience, and then establishes the dramatic relations of the play in interacting with the actors themselves, the music first establishes, and then weaves into, the tragic narrative.

The tragic form, that was once the strongest expression of many of our universal archetypes, has strangely lost its relevance in the present. The inability to conceive of a tragic hero, perhaps because the increasing fragmentation of our dominant value-system cannot sustain the total 'order' that tragic action asserts, has nevertheless made it very difficult for an entire dimension of human experience to be expressed in modern art-forms. This is possibly because the all-encompassing character of the tragic hero of the Creek period, for instance, could not carry on in the face of the increasing secularisation of its experience, and the individualising of the heroic figure. The terrible encounter with the oracle in the Greek period gave way to heroic and dignified suffering; the cathartic affect itself underwent a transformation. The ethical issues became more personal, losing their cosmic significance. Greater importance was now given to accident, to individual choice as the concept of destiny lost relevance. The Marxian breakthrough apparently has furthered this fragmentation, because historicism itself emphatically denies "destiny". Later on the socialist-realist position, with its often narrowed-down concept of social progress, necessarily looked upon with suspicion at the romantic version of the cathartic affect But it is strange that it is only with the post-Marxian spirit that the tragic form itself achieves new relevance. A new form of justice, anew vision of order, andmost significantly, a new cause for which even the

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This introductory musical sequence is a minor masterpiece by itself, and since such passages are repeated all the time in Ghatak's work, it would be worthwhile observing one of them in some detail. There are four movements, from the introductory to the main body and then to its highest pitch where human voices come in. The initial introductory piece, working on an instrument of the sitar genre, recalls the rabindrasangeet through its meend (stretched-out notes); it gives way to the most important motif in the film the hill theme expressing Neeta's desireswhere the flute is followed by the human voice. By now the distanced swaras, the slow laya and the repetition of the komal ni takes us close to the kalavathi ragaand instantly connects with the visual, which is a slow pan over black water just showing the starry ripples. Chatak has used this raga in Subarnarekha to accompany the mood of the flowing river. But here it is not in fact the Kalavathi, because the individual notes do not slide into each other, they come as emphatically individual, denying the raga its own fullness. As the wave goes into its next pitch, where the Malhar is established, we see the design. The ragas blend into one another, giving the notes their individuality; it is veritably an attempt to create a musical pan-shot The emphasising of the individual note permits him a different slidefrom the instrument to the voice as the more complex motif gives way to three simple notes in the end. The complexity of the Malhar on the violin gives way to the simplicity of the tabla which first heightens its bol and then tala. We then return to the Malhar, but the laya is now faster and much simpler. The passage has now got a fullness, a body. And then it is immediately lifted to a grandeur, a sonorousness through the deep human voices, and then climactically through the three notes repeated four times over. The transcendence is also from the earlier associations of the Maihar and the flute which itself recalls the mountains (it is the instrument commonly used to render the Pahadi), to the precision of the notes of the 'Working Peoples' Theme' which borrows from the staccatto of the machine. What we particularly note with the music in Meghe Dhaka Tara is its use as something more significant than narration; it is to the film what the landscape was to Eisenstein, "the freest element in the film, liberated from the tasks of narration". The freeing of sound, and then its juxtaposition with the much more culture-specific visual language is what enables the pathos to move beyond cultural barriers. This enhances the dialectic between the specific and the general that we

see in his archetypes: which are at once the most culture-specific and, in the universality of the Mother Goddess, the mo'st general. Miklos Jansco, it may be mentioned in passing, achieves precisely the reverse: a very specific tradition in his sound, and a wider visual language evoked through the nude figure. As we move on, we see the manner of this freeing the other effects, the sound of rice boiling, the crickets, the children narrating their tables, are all musical sounds drawn from nature. In this introduction there is also an abstraction: the rice boiling is repeated at an entirely different moment, when the mother enters the screen and listens to Sanat talking to Neeta. Contrasted against these simple sounds are the Hamsadhwani and the Malhar ragas. The Hamsadhwani, beginning in the first scene in Shankar's raw, as-yet-untrained voice, gradually develops through the film to chronicle Shankar's growth as a singer. But the fully-developed raga,introduced a"t precisely the time when Neeta discovers her tuberculosis, comes also as a revivifying life-assertion that contrasts against the tragedy of Neeta's own imminent death. The Malhar too, the magnificent Karim Naam Tero, is introduced in a significant manner. It hovers imperceptibly in the background soon after the Baul song, butthen moves to the fore accompanied bya shot of Shankar, back to camera and almost in the dark, which (lightens the dramatic gratuitousness of the moment, but also becomes the first complete expression of what has been experienced from the very beginningthe fertility so dominant in the natural milieu. The Malhar mood is present from the first shot in which the natural elements are introduced, and through the hill theme naturally evokes the vast panshots of the rain-drenched mountains that echo Neeta's last desires. The drawing of music as pure sound from nature, and the attempt to place it on a parallel with the grandeur of the developed classical form becomes a first step towards breaking out of our effete classicism and towards a rediscovery of the strong material roots of the classical form. It is a formal counterpoint of the freeing of the archetype itself. The melodramatic form, it must be rememberedespecially in the light of the vulgar use of the termsis really indicative of the melodic-dramatic range of a performing art It is the expressive range that has traditionally been a part of theatrical performance, until, that is, the realist position substituted it with slavish imitation of life. In the Natyashastra too we see the strong emphasis given to sangeet and abhinaya as extensions of samvad. Such an expressive, and emotional,

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range becomes a necessity if it is to bear the weight of the tragic form. The 'inevitability' of the theme now achieves its own significance. The portrayal of the myth unfolding, and the relentlessness with which it moves to completion is the means used to open up its closed form. 'Inevitability" is really a characteristic of all tragedy, but in its dramatic latter-day form it does not preclude the gripping of the spectator in purely dramatic suspense, something that achieves its most popular form in the triumph of the'good'. While this is also a form of the myth working out to its end, we have to note the manner of its foreshortening. The move beyond the ritual-pjocesss and into a recognition is never permitted. From Meghe Dhaka Tara we get a definite indication of what elements constitute the epic. If we imagine a constant probing into the fabric of narrative schema towards an unveiling of its mythic base, then these epic elements would, through montage structures, counterpoint the myths and explode them into epic energy.The music in the film touches the epic because it takes us beyond the linearity of the dramatic and evocativeness of the lyrical into the violent counterpointing of antagonistic forces of the epic. The realisation then has to emerge from the profundity of the lifeexperience and echo the struggle for survival from its very depths. Many of Chatak's critics who accuse him of over-dramatisation of the final scene in which Neeta cries out her desire to live, have failed to relate to the controlled expression of protest that precedes this scene. It first comes when, just before the rabindra-sangeet, Shankar tells Neeta that he has decided to leave the house, as a protest against her exploitation. The rabindra-sangeet itself becomes an expression

Meghe Dhaka Tara

of this protest as Ghatak extends Rabindranath Tagore's imagery in violent reassertion of hope amidst despair. The song is about a powerful storm opening out the emptiness of her house and life, but also heralding the arrival of the man she has waited for. As the camera tracks in the near-darknessonly the two figures in silhouette and the photograph of Neeta's childhood in the hills are litthe storm that in the image hammers on her doorstep (an image physically repeated at the time when Neeta leaves the house) now becomes an expression of all her turmoil, of the violence done to her bv the others. But then one line in the song jhor je tomar joyor dhowja tai ki jaani or "How was I to know then that storm was your victory flag ?" comes as the beacon of hope, the recognition that through suffering comes salvation. Towards the end of the film Neeta says to Sanat that she has to 'atone' for her sin (prayaschita) which was that she never protested. In departure from the norms of tragic portrayal here the protagonist herself, the most passive, comes to realise her'fault*. This is not elsewhere, even beyond Neeta, extended to any conscious struggle for freedom from oppression, and in fact it is her death that enhances the process of life-perpetuation. How then do we reconcile this with her recognition of her'sin' ? Writing of Potemkin Eisenstein says: From a particle of the battleship's organism to the organism as a whole; from a particle of the navy's organism the battleship to the navy's organism as a whole. This is how the feeling of

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revolutionary brotherhood develops thematically; and the composition of the work on the subject of the brotherhood of toilers and of revolution develops parallel with it.. And the remarkable thing about these dividing points is that they mark not a transition to a merely different mood, to a merely different rhythm, to a merely different event, but show each time that the transition is to a sharply opposite quality. To say that we have contrasts would not be enough: the image of the same theme is each time presented from the opposite point-of-view, although it grows out of the theme itself."

The cry : Meghe Dhaka Tara

The dying girl's cry Dada, amibanjbo (Brother, I will live) echoing through the hills, the violent affirmation of the right to life, is what achieves this transition. It not only echoes through her entire past, through those pitiful expressions of protest, but also reverberates beyond herself, touching upon the suffering of a whole people like her, bound down to the rituals that have come down from her predecessors and desfgned to keep future humanity in bondage. This is the only point of expression of the conflict between the archetype and the individual, but the violence with which the release comes shows the nature of the bondage. If in Potemkin revolutionary spirit leaps like wildfire, here the cry resonates across individual differences and expresses the anguish of the struggling class. But then there is an immediate receding the hills that have echoed her cry are passive, the nature that wept for her stares mutely

back. It jerks us once more to the present, causing a reversal very similar to the inert nature at the end of Ajantrik If the antagonistic forces have won, something more significant than that has also occurred, which could not have occurred had Chatak accepted the life-affirmative as the ultimate conclusion the emphatic denial of romantic false-consciousness. As much related to the archetypal forms as the rituals is the romanticism strongly etched into the middle-class. The link is obvious"the acceptance of the archetype in its particular form, and the hope of release coming through its transmutation of human desires, is the romantic dream that took birth when these desires snapped their relation to the material level of their existence.. In the film, there is a constant attempt to bring out the romantic through various conventions and violently negate them, reverse them into an indictment of the romantic sensibility itself. At its largest this reversal comes through the archetype itself. The nostalgia of the Durga Puja has the ancient tradition of gauri-daan or the giving away of the girl, often a little child, in marriage to a stranger. "This created, along with fear, a deep nostalgia," writes Ghatak, "Our folk-lores are full of this... this is why Durga is a daughter to us; that is why autumn is a season of nostalgia for us." The only moments of happiness that are seen in the earlier part of the film are those of nostalgia Tarun-babu taking Neeta for a picnic on her birthday which falls on jagadhatari puja, or Neeta receiving the 'Meghe Dhaka Tara' letter from Sanat When the ritual is ripped off and the cruel aspect of the mother surfaces, the violence has ripples that shake every manifestation of this romanticism. At the end of the rabindra-sangeet we once more

the water motif: Meghe Dhaka Tara

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hear the terrible whiplash gaining in crescendo until all else is drowned out The romantic is really displaced through the character of the old man Tarun babu. He is the only person who holds a value-system outside of the exploitative petty-bourgeois aspirations of the family. At one level the character has been portrayed with great sympathy, with his inability to reconcile himself to the change caused by his exile. But the crisis goes beyond that, and touches upon the fact that he belongs to the Bengali middle-class into which had devolved the traditions of liberalism of the 19th century. This class possessed a strong rhetorical tendency in its conciousness seen so much in Tarun babu himself but nevertheless claimed whatever vestiges of progressivism that still existed in the face of the rapaciousness of the bourgeoisie and the complete absence of anything with which to combat it The violence with which Tarun babu is rendered impotent, then pathetic and even superfluous, the almost surreal accident in which he loses both feet, his refusal to accept that his son has joined the'Jabour' class, and finally that inane'l accuse...', each brings with it a merciless indictment of the man and his class.

" I accuse" : /vregne unat^<i

This has to be seen historically: the time when Ghatak worked was such a moment when nothing could change without a fundamental recognition of the materialist level of human existence and its traditions, which were the only ones that could offer an alternative to the oppressed classes. The transition from a bourgeois to an apparently revolutionary romanticism has been, we have seen time and again, very often a facile one, more damaging than otherwise. Thus nature itself, the most vibrant reflection of the conflict between the individual and the archetype through the film, recedes at

the end, indifferent once more. The downfall of the protagonist, always irr the tragic form representing more than the destruction of an individual, is here the destruction of the romantic as Neeta is once more reduced to ordinariness in the last shot What is then the reassertion, the tragic recognition ? It is partly the fact that in the experience of the tragedy the myth itself has been attacked. But more than that, what is reasserted is the material base that is hidden within the ritual that brings the past to us. The extreme decorativeness of ritual in the middle and lower classes, contrasted with the enormous outpouring of an orgiastic energy into annual festivals, indicates the way in which the libidinal outlet has been distorted from its original fertility rites into this frenzied spectacle within modern ritualism. D. D. Kosambi chronicles precisely the form in which the ancient archetypes found initial expression, and how as they grew to challenge the dominant icons they were absorbed into the dominant culture. He writes " The ideas of ritual and sacrifice... develop before classes, as first efforts on the part of mankind to control a mysterious environment beyond its logical and technical powers. Imitating the animals led to better techniques of the chase,-but was visualised as sympathetic magic giving control over animals; hunting scenes in our caves... are not records but magic to increase the yield of actual hunts. Thus began religion, the dance, graphic arts, poetry and music... Thus it is possible to interpret the origins of sacrifice as the primitive magic forerunner of systematic agriculture and animal-breeding. It seems ridiculous to us now to discover traces of fertility rites performed by European stone-age people for the increase of flints. There arose a mysterious dread of mensturation the tabu upon a male touching, even by accident, the person or unwashed clothes of a woman in her courses still being universal in the Indian village along with the worship of the Mother Goddess, and of the moon whose cycle corresponds to the menstural cycle of the human female. Sublimated into a mystical discipline, but with the gross, obscene, even gruesome details written down as they were, the most primitive fertility rites reappear as Tantric practices... In later class-society, these rituals often subsist in form, though

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the content is totally different. Generally the immediate purpose in settled producing society is profit for the priest class, which insists that certain observances are necessary; at a deeper level the unwieldy mass ot ritual serves to petrify the later society, to help preserve the class-structure and the status-quo. This is also the reason why some communities still remain atrophied as food gatherers. Kosambi consistently documents the fundamentally pastoral content of the original archetypes, and how these underwent transformation with the production of surplus value and the rise of the priestly class. Most significant of all, he documents the continuing relevance of these archetypal forces in the present, and the changed form of their expression. For example: The sacrifices went out of fashion with the pastoral economy when independent petty kingdoms had been wiped out.. The sacrifices might have revived if the samaja were permitted. The occasional sama/a is permitted to this day, as in the vetala sacrifices... The grand, annual holi festival (without sacrifice but with obscene shouts, drinking, songs, wrestling matches and bonfires) is a fertility orgy that may be traced back to the late stone-age. Through the expression of the archetype in Neeta's character, the dominant image is displaced into an expression of an individual's struggle for survival. The entire contemporary expression of those forms in the present in Meghe Dhaka Tara reflects in true milieu the manner in which formal assimilation of the lower-class material culture for many centuries has given rise to the dominant ideology. Cultural distortion, leading to fragmentation of form moving in many ways to its nadir in bourgeois-realism, is echoed in its long history through this conflict of rituals. And this is the tragic recognition itself. The'inevitable' decline of the heroic character is here extended to the inevitability of the myth working out to its end; the ancient archetypes of Creek theatre are here replaced by the figure of Neeta, and the encounter with the terrible oracle is here a confrontation with the material level of struggle. We therefore see how the overcoming of the isolation of the individual leads to the past, to the history that led to isolation. And

here, as Ghatak overcomes the limitations of later bourgeois tragedy and confronts the mythic essence, he also opens out the mythic closed system into the historicity of the epic. The alternate tradition then becomes neither mere narrative history which is little more than chronicling of events, nor pure myth for both have been vital tools in the ruling-class arsenal but a history that gives a new identity to the present, to the oppressed classes of our time.

IV
The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great coordinating mythologies which are now known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressed individual; today, no meaning is in the group none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones have been cut, and we have been split in two. The hero deed to be wrought today is not what it was in the century of Galileo. Where there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or away, from what has been accomplished in the modern revolution; for the problem is nothing if not... that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading or even pernicious. Joseph Campbell The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

The problem of human portrayal within the context of the present must be seen as a major one. If it constitutes significant portrayal of

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man in his environment, we can see how with the changed identity of both following increasing emphasis on the individualist position, the dominant art-forms today usually use only the extremes of the relationship: eitheras transcendental, where the immediate response to nature is only indicative of something larger, or realist where man relates to nature in fixed, established conventions. Only in these extremes is a response both material and significant absent The new direction that Ghatak attempted with Meghe Dhaka Tara is clean in that film the spatial relationship with nature extends into history, and certain universal responses within the present achieve a strength that recalls their past, the history of man confronting nature. In establishing the exploitative form of the dominant archetypes Ghatak counterpoints these with the contemporary-realist portrayal of the tragedy of an individual. This counterpointing is done with all the deliberation of a concerted attempt to break down the false separation between the external-realist and internal-archetypal, so that it may be able to relate to the present historically. This deliberation prevents the film from succeeding in the one principle of archetypal construction that Ghatak himself has stated that ot the inevitability with which the archetype comes forth and recedes. The element of freedom, the consciously widened canvas that permits such inevitability comes to his work only after he has put this film behind him. Let us see what such freedom entails. Let us extend the separated individual and archetypal aspects of the form into a definite timespace relation in their portrayal. The pattern of individualism in society is a particular relation of the individual to nature, to his environment His response to external reality is an expression of the way he sees himself as figuring in it, and this is in itself emerges from a particular pattern of social division that forms the basis of his value-system. The family that Ghatak takes as the nuclear social unit in Meghe
Dhaka Tara has a well-entrenched mythic system that affirms its identity. Something that directly affects the family becomes enormously significant what goes beyond its immediate purview is either scaled down to individual comprehension or ignored. Tarun babu's opinions of things in the world outside are reduced to meaninglessness before the mother's domination. And this is the mythic system that all mass-communication emerging from the bourgeois position uses to address the individual.

Mass communication consistently scales down complex reality to suit the individual's perspective of the world. It reflects his individual biases, it emphasises the pattern of social division that gives him his individuality. And strangely enough, it does so through the use of the archetypal. The individual identities with what is communicated through the heroic figure of commercial cinema, the enviable model of advertising, or always hovering over all bourgeois communication, the archetypal ideal member of its society possessing all that is w.orth attaining within its value-systems. These figures interpret the complexity of reality portrayed by reducing it to a few choices open to the individual. The archetype is significant here because it is clearly through more than merely realist communication that the responses of the audience are manipulated. Upon the simpler myths that go to make up the individual sensibility are imposed the more complex myths; a view of the world is presented to the individual showing him at its centre, and this is reinforced with larger-than-life evidence drawn from sources that he cannot comprehend, but which convince him that all that is, is the only way it can be. The denial of the archetype then becomes a definition of realism. As both form and content are drained of their larger significancethe rationalism of content, which had in its origins been the means of overcoming superstition, is now used to deny the unconscious itself; this in form has its counterpart in the replacement of sensuous experience with conventionthe illusion of reality grows stronger, the individual, addressed as a very special person, only further merges his identity with that of the crowd. From the individual i.e. rational time-space relation, as we move to mythical time and space, all the established relations change. The search for meaning in myth is always a perilous attempt, for one has to move between literal interpretation and the mystical, transcendentalist one. The artist, for the most part an adult, a rationalist, has to somehow plumb the depths of his unconscious, draw upon experiences that have usually suffered a sustained attack from his own rationalism. Ghatak moves to his childhood, to the experience of childhood in general. He uses this to make a larger statement on the loss of innocence, and more significantly, to break down individual barriers by expressing certain universals that emerge from childhood. The animism in Ajantrik is a precise extension of the childhood universal;

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the nostalgia in Meghe Dhaka Tara when Neeta's memories of childhood on the hills, as they colour the mood, express something universal in the Bengali culture associated with Durgaandgaur/-daan. The significance of childhood is the most clearly seen in Subarnarekha, where the excitement of discovery, the protection of the mother through nature, all these emotions are all deeply felt in the film. The experience of childhood is fundamental to Komal Gandhar. Most of the memories, the joys of discovery and the apprehensions, are extended to larger reference in the film as Chatak once more returns to the theme of Partition and the people who lived through it and suffered in its aftermath. As Chatak's work grew and began reflecting relationships very different from the dominant individuated ones, the established ones were rejected. The tightly knit family of Meghe Dhaka Tara gives way to increasingly nebulous, undefined relationshipsthe brother-sister one in Komal Candhar and Subarnarekha, the completely undefined foursome of jukti Takko Ar Cappo. Ansuya in Komal Candhar sees something of her mother in Bhrigu; Sita, the young sister, grows to be a mother to Ishwar in Subarnarekha later in the film they confront each other as the incestuous relationship is suggested. The other important state is that of the orphan, which again becomes significant in larger context as we shall see in Komal Candhar. These relationships which negate the surface realism of theme are important because the form itself suggests a return to the realist, at least insofar as the characters and situations are in his later work much more firmly rooted in the contemporary than they were in Meghe Dhaka Tara.

With this film we come to Chatak himself. Here the element of autobiography, if not as strong as in juktiTakkoAr Gappo, isimportant in the manner in which he uses i t In both films, we have to view the autobiographical not only n terms of events, external occurrences, but in terms of something more significant, an aspect of the autobiographical that C.C. Jung describes when he writes Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happening! It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.24 The autobiographical form becomes also a means of articulating certain universals. The artist, in portraying an external event, invests in his character something of the unexplained, his own feelings and biases. As the artist draws upon his unconscious, he also brings to bear the images of the collective unconscious as the work of art moves beyond external portraiture into something more.

Komal Candhar

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The contemporary in Komal Gandhar is defined on a much larger scale than Meghe Dhaka Tara, one coming almost to the neorealist in its historical definition of the socio-political milieu. In concerning itself with a movement like the IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) that spanned across Bengal, the film too conceptually spaces itself over the entire state.

Komal Candhar is primarily a film of two individuals, Bhrigu and Ansuya, and of the chasm of the past that separates them. As it portrays their life and struggle, a struggle as tied to their attempts to come to terms with a traumatic past as to their present survival of individual and of tradition, the film becomes a portrayal of something more, of forces that move beyond the individual.

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For the two are clearly not distanced from each other by individual differences but by their heritageshe grown up amid the communal riots in which she lost her mother, trying to search for something more significant to life than the narrow path outlined for her by her family; he, unable to reconcile to the loss of his homeland, struggling to express the'rhythm of Bengal'. In the distance that separates the two is virtually devolved the fragmented remains of our traditionalmost tike the couple in Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, their attempts to come together can only be if they first come to terms with their past, with events that have separated them for decades, which took place even before they were born. For Bhrigu and Ansuya, their coming together is not distinct from the separation of their two theatre groups, or from the barriers that face their creative struggle. The film is mainly concerned with such a breaking up of relationships: individual ones extending to larger splinterings so that they express the family break-up, the breaking up of the group, and eventually that of the civilisation itself. The film is based on the period when the IPTA lost its unified front as a major cultural movement, a process that took place with the gradual contradictions within the Communist Party surfacing in its affiliated organisations as well. In addition to the basic problems the orthodox movement faced since Independenceof whether to side with the progressive bourgeoisie or notwas now the one of resisting its mass-culture. Ghatak, whose sensitivity was seared by the experience of Partition, could not distinguish this indecision from the overall inability of the lower classes to escape the bourgeois influence. For Bhrigu in the film, as for Ghatak then, the terrible isolation is many times enhanced by the petty infighting within the group, within people who ought to have been together against a much formidable common enemy. Ghatak constantly draws upon motifs that show the unitythathefelt still existed between" the peoples of the two Bengals, contrasting these with the actual state of things in Calcutta The initial cleavage thus goes deeper and deeper, with a constant opening out as we glimpse the traditions that unite the two groups still, and a dissolving into the entrapment of the urban milieu divided by petty bourgeois ambition. This divide extends spatially: the Bengali countryside where the troupe performs contrasted by Calcutta itself, or the freedom of the hills in Darjeeling giving way to the small room in Calcutta hemmed in even more by the rain.

The most significant image of the natural landscape comes in the scene of the river Padma; it is also the point at which he introduces the motif of the river, one that has dominated his work right through. The Subarnarekha, for instance in the film of that name, where the river is used as something that represents the horizons beyond, the promise of a new home. The Padma itself is a central motif in Durbargati Padma which Ghatak made in 1971 in protest against the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. Perhaps the most important use of the river is seen in his Titash Ekti Nadir Naam where the river is a silent provider to the fishing community, and its drying up heralds the death of a civilisation and the birth of another. To the Padma, in Komal Gandhar, come Bhrigu's troupe. We see them in a vigorous mood as they set off in the fishing boats and their voices float over the stillness of the water. This is the surfacing of the youthful and militant togetherness of the troupe, something only suggested obliquely in Calcutta where the dominant feeling is one of rivalry. There we had a contemptuous Shanta, Ansuya's insult by her own group, the story of how the two groups splitbut that was contrasted by the refugee, for example, who walks up to Bhrigu and tells him that it is his own story that has been enacted on stage, of the group singing a rousing chant just in the background which also suggests the larger traditions of the people that it brings together. The banks of the Padma, offering a performing space with the width of all nature, opens out from the hemmed-in city. The very basis of struggle, so obscured in the city, becomes sharply clear here as the natural stretch of water becomes an artificial separation of a people

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into two. The Padma forms the barrier between Indian and Bangladesh, and for Ansuya it is an even more personal divide because just beyond lies Noakhali where her mother met her death. The creative spirits surge forth within the protective, monumental river. This Bengal sky full of light, this south breeze, this flow of the river, this broad leisure stretching from horizon to horizon, all these were to me as food and drink to the hungry and thirsty. Here it felt indeed like home, and in these I recognised the ministrations of a Mother. (Rabindranath Tagore)" Something very deep from with the Bengali tradition gradually gets expressed. The river does not possess the archetype specificity of the water in Meghe Dhaka lara, but in its perennial placidity, its life through so many civilisations, and the way it lives out its own life-cycle of death and rebirth through the seasons, this elevates it to the image of the providing mother. It was from just such a placidity that the Mother herself rose and turned a deep red with the blood of the dead Bangladeshis in Durbargati Padma. Here the placidity indicates how something larger than what is in human hands carries on despite human failure; it reduces the individuals Bhrigu and Ansuya standing on the edge of the railway track to miniscule size before its own grandeur. The camera, pulling back from the Padma, pans majestically round in a full circle, showing the passive nature all round them.The joyous songs of the troupe are countered by the haunting E Paar Podda, O Paar Podda (Podda is the Bengali pronunciation of Padma). Bhrigu is unable to keep his feelings back any longer, and at one point suddenly asks Ansuya contemptuously, "What do you know about what one feels when one is deprived of one's homeland?" Crumbling to the ground, Ansuya tells him, "I know/ I know". We are at another revolutionary use of the man-nature relationship. Passive nature, violently imbued with the feelings of the characters, represents the past as its remnants are now part of naturelike the railway track. But it is also more than that, it recalls the primordial being in oneself, the first expression of the raw power in nature that we, of the post-urban culture, fail to recognise but which is recognised among all people who still depend on nature for their survival.

The Padma : Komal Candhar

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This Chatak gets directly through his childhood experience, in which the Padma itself figured prominently. My days were spent on the banks of the Padma, the days of an unruly and wild child. The people on the passenger boats looked like dwellers on some distant planet. The large merchant ships coming from Patna, Bankipore, Monghyr. carrying sailors speaking a strange tongue, with a mixture of dialect in it I saw the fishermen. In the drizzling rain a joyful tune would float in the village air, pulling at one's heartstrings with the sudden gusts of wind. I have rocked in the steamer on the turbulent river after dark and listened to the rhythmic sound of the engines, the bell of the sareng, the cry of the boatman measuring the depths.26 He goes on in these recollections to recount how he was once lost on the river and concluded, when he could not find his way home, that the 'spirts of the lake' had ensnared him. There are very subtle shifts in mood within the sequence, and the tempo builds up unknown to us. But it erupts suddenly at the end, growing into the impassioned tracking shot on the railway line that emphasises with characteristic whiplash-like violence the wedge driven into the once-united civilisation. The child turns into an adult; what was once merely pleasurable and exciting is now revealed in its sordid colours. For Ghatak, the point of growth from the freedom of childhood to the bondage of the present extends to the transformation from a united to a divided Bengal. We were born in a deceived age. The days of our childhood and adolescence saw the full flowering of Bengal. Tagore, with his overpowering genius, at the peak of his literary career; the renewed vigour of Bengali literature... the widespread national movement in schools and colleges, among the youth of Bengal; the villages of Bengal with their folk-tales, folk-songs and festivals, brimming over the hope of a new life. Just then came the war, came famine. The Muslim League and the Congress brought the country to ruin by tearing it apart and accepting a destructive Independence. Communal riots flooded the -country. The waters of the Ganga and the Padma were red with the blood of our brothers. These are our own experiences. We stumbled and fell, desperately clutching at a wretched and impoverished Bengal."

The perception of Bengal of the Tagorean period as its childhood somehow is extremely appropriate for Tagore himself may be described as Marx described the Greeks, a'normal' child, 'neither unruly nor precocious'. If the Greek civilisation was the 'historic childhood of humanity'28 then so was the 'full flowering of Bengal' under the Tagoream influence the childhood of the Bengali culture, for more reasons than the ones Marx considers while mentioning the Greeks. Here there was not only that nuturing of popular consciousness within the defined cultural milieu that Tagore provided Bengal, but also in Tagore's work, repeated attempts to capture the particular experience of childhood itself, the pleasures of discovery, the pain of growth. And most significantly, the tremendous importance of the Mother which pervades all of Tagore's work, once more a direct reference to a childhood universal. Many people feel impatient with Ghatak's excessive dwelling in the past, at what seems his violent rejection of everything modern. This position ignores the particular significance Ghatak brings to the past in drawing responses from it that still permit him to express a yital response to the present milieu. We have seen Ghatak's repeated negation of the romantic position; it is therefore important to see that he did not take a simplistic stand and throw out all that smelled of romanticism. In making Tagore's romantic world-view a vital part of his childhood, Ghatak was able to contrast that with the terrible violence done to it by the alien classes from withoutwhich is what he has wanted to show in his work, and which is important Any other attitude to the past would have destroyed the possibility of using it to show such a conflict
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Komal Candhar

Komal Candhar

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Moving from the Padma sequence, as Chatak portrays the city urbanism, the unstated present in his workhe is able to elevate his form to an intensity that permits him to extend even simple events to the archetypal. For instance, the point at which Ansuya discovers in Bhrigu's eyes the same fiery look that she has always remembered in her mother. Her mother, killed at Npakhali where she had gone as supporterto Gandhi, had always represented for Ansuya some kind of ideal in her life. She gives Bhrigu her mother's diary, and he sees in it an entryher last, on the day of her death in 1946, where is the same concern expressed about the wedge being driven into people who should be together. She speaks of the terrible tandav, the orgy of destruction that is going on all round her, and her last words are, ekho, ek ho, he bhagwan (be one, be one, oh Cod). Ansuya's search for something of her mother in Bhrigu is already a reference to the archetypal, but now the juxtaposition has a dimension that extends to their struggle and to Bengal itself. Bhrigu's search for some kind of completeness of expression in the post-Partition context is specially a recovery from the elements that have ravaged the state in the name of the nationalist movement In making a reference to the Noakhali carnage, where Ansuya was orphaned (and is still orphaned by her inacceptance in either theatre group) and extending it to her present struggle, Ghatak compresses in that episode a width of humanism that evokes the violence that has racked that defenceless state during that entire period of war, Partition and communal riots. In portraying the attempt of two individuals to reach out to each other, each searching within the other for something that would help overcome the burden of the past, the film bears resemblance to Hiroshima Mon Amour. But as this scene shows, Ghatak has lesser need for elements from the dramatic than Resnais, and consequently touches a higher form of the epic We shall see, with similar moments in Subarnarekha, how the level goes to the famous bar-room scene in Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon orparticularly in Subarnarekhathe Vietnam war scene in Godard's PierroJ: Le Fou. For instance the sharply-etched character of the old Harijan woman in Komal Gandhar who gives Bhrigu an old memento won by her dead son, and says to him, 'You are all my sons'. Ghatak, searching for the embodiment of the protective Mother who would once more unite her wayward sons, is able to bring the archetype to life with remarkable economy. This old woman, coming to life for no more than a few seconds, recalls the dimensions of the character of Sujata in

Mahasweta Devi's Ek Hajaar Chauraswe ki Maa in the way the mother of an individual who dies in the struggle becomes the Mojther figure of the entire youth who are still struggling. There is yet another scene done with even greater economy, when the orphan child clutches at Ansuya's sari, pulling with it a toy motor car. The camera tracks with the toy car the only object in the frame as it is dragged on the street; and the sound effect, of the police firing on a peaceful procession of teachers and of sirens wailing and people shouting, grows to a violent cacophony.

As the countryside fades into the city, we have a transformation of milieu from the protective forces of nature to the alienation of the urban environment The freedom and spontaneity of expression 6n the Padma, or Darjeeling where Rishi bursts forth into song, becomes in the city the despair and infighting within the troupe. Vibrant nature in the countryside gives way to the filthy rain of Calcutta. Much of this is established through the use of space. Calcutta, claustrophobic in its interiorsthe garage, the rooms, the restaurants is also the place where the individuals are most isolated. Bhrigu and Ansuya, so distant in the crowded city, come together only in the silence of the sand dunes. This is in fact an extension to the individuals of the division of theatrical space. The small and cramped stage of the New Empire theatre becomes a mute witness to the'bitter rivalries and ruined performance of Shakuntalam, contrasted with the spontaneity of the troupe's performances in the village, or even creative bursting forth in the rehearsal rooms.

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Nature transformed : Komal Candhar

Meeting an actor backstage is itself a theatrical experience, used often as an alienating device. The best example of this in recent times is Carlos Saura's Blood Wedding, where a substantial section of the film shows the ballet troupe making up before the mirrors and the entire action takes place on the rehearsal floor. It is a means of portraying another reality about the actual portrayal: something that shows what has gone into it, the effort that has been taken. The spontaneity of the performersmoments such as the one where we see Jaya dancing before a small group in a village accompanied only by a human voice keeping rhythm, or that spectacular dance with the saw to which Bijon Bhattacharya (the refugee-playwright in the film) brings in his own theatrical discipline lead on to the muktkaro song the troupe sings while travelling, or their rehearsals. These are the scenes where the struggling men and women of the troupe are shown with the greatest compassion, when they rest with their props, or trudge with them to distant places. In these scenes the struggles is shown in embryo as preparation. It somehow makes it more alive, particularly in the context of Chatak's largely critical attitude to their work. The shots on the rehearsal floor are inevitably angled, the proscenium quality of frontal shots rejected in the attempt to get really close to the individuals. But these shots also disturbwhen for instance Ghatak builds up an uneasy feeling with the moving, unsteady light sources from behind. The proscenium performaces are specifically related to Calcutta, to the inane competitiveness and sense of rivalry between groups. The

film begins with a heavy, toneless voice announcing the second act of the play in the competition which both Bhrigu and Shanta (Ansuya's aunt) have participated. The camera tracks back to show a contemptuous aunt, her Huh, natok korchhi! (Huh, trying toact!) rings forth as the bitterness between the groups surfaces. It comes to the fore at just the point when in grotesque caricature we see a politician standingon the stage making a loud speech to the effect that'Our voices will not be stilled, we will carry on!' During the entire sequence of the disastrous performance of Shakuntalam, the audience is never shown, and every device used to perpetuate make-believethe backdrops, the machinery, the sound equipmentis underlined. The camera right through stands on the stage itself, showing the awkward direction, the white make-up, always emphasising the space to the extent of even showing the stage in a shot taken from vertically above. The image that remains of this misguided experiement, apart from the idiotic actor from Shanta's troupe who walks on the stage with his spectacles on, is that of Bhrigu

Performing in the city : Komal Candhar

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himself, an absurd figure in his Dushyanta make-up, running hither and thither trying to avert the sabotaging of the show. And then the final showdown, where amid long shadows on the rehearsal floor the group tears itself apart. Allegations of dictatorial behaviour, of a lack of any concern for people, selfcentredness, are hurled at Bhrigu, who just sits, head in his hands, silent. Nobody wants to support Bhrigu; they walk out in a body. On the wall we see a huge mask of Kali, eyes flared. The last part of the film is an extended montage ot the images and sounds of disruption: police firing, the sounds of agitating teachers, the little child clutching at Ansuya's sarithis finds its culmination when as Ansuya virtually begs of her brother to let her stay on in Calcutta (she is supposed to go abroad where her fiancee is based), we hear the chant that has accompanied the violent tracking shot on the Padma, punctuated by the sounds of police firing. This part takes us to the other extreme of his expressive rangethe characters are shown at their most alienated; the urban milieu stands out in sharp contrast to the nature of the countryside; the slow songs that we hear on the soundtrack, some of which are marriage songs centuries old, some from Baul origins, now give way to the sound of the gun and the wail of the siren. This is the culmination of the contemporary images of the Creative and the Destructive. It is here that we can discover in Ghatak's work the emergence of a genuine inevitability of archetypal construction. He no longer sees need to name his images or point out their archetypal origins. As the form moves towards the epic, the images move to an affectivity that necessarily recalls the archetypes.

Komal (jandhar

In the end, therefore, the reunification of Bhrigu and Ansuya resonates right through the film as we see shots of the Padma, the vertical pan-shot of Calcutta city, the ravines where Bhrigu and Ansuya first opened themselves out to each other, the hills of Darjeeling which, as Rishi has told Bhrigu, down to the plains, the rivers and the sea, possess a'rhythm of Bengal'. The creative principle here becomes the sum of the collective traditions of the people, traditions that still unifythe man-nature relationship that emphasises this, the experience of childhood and the figure of the protective Mother, the destructive is the separatist tendency, the factionalism that pervades the city. This is a redefinition that offers us the direction to the future, which permits the overcoming ofthe crisis of heroic portrayal that Joseph Campbell points out. After pointing out the excessively individualised identity of man in the present, which is what has made the restatement of meaning within the group difficult, Campbell goes on to say, The community today is the planet, not the bonded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. These are the precise elements that are used in Komal Gandhar: infantilism gives way to healthier childhood as"nursery-ego nationalism' is replaced by a more profound archetypal response to the motherland, and the fierce desire to restate one's identity in terms of one's past becomes the establishment of a larger humanism.

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At one point, soon after the group has split, Bhrigu talks of the play that has just been completed by the refugee in their group. His excitement mounts as he describes it, "An avishkar... Khudiram Theke Rabindranath.*. towering passion... Nabanna kore", and the'polyphonic pattern' that the play follows. The last is possibly a reference to Eisestein and the emphasis, coming just after the biggest crisis the group has yet faced, is unambiguously on the regenerative strength the struggle receives from the creative spirit even at its darkest It is certainly the point at which Bhrigu comes the closest to Ghatak himself.

"Crimes, rape, mad nights of love, blackmail, suicide, torture, the goddess Kali: everything had to be set in the Grand Hotel" Federico Fellini

This well-known quote from Fellini describing his childhood surely represents one of the most striking examples, when associated with Subarnarekha, of how within the epic dimension images touch a universal, quality. In the night club sequence of Subarnarekha Chatak 'quotes' from Fellini's La Dolce Vita by using the same musical track, Patricia, while Fellini, referring to the same imagery of modern decadence refers to the very archetype Ghatak has used to portray i t When does a particular configuration of images rise to revolutionary form? The human being, as we see him in the present, is engulfed within the contemporary: the dramatic level of the man-environment relationship. He seeks to enlarge upon this through his growing comprehension of the past, and thus through his recognition of the larger consequences of his struggle. The complex and usually incomprehensible forces that guide the present start revealing themselves when exposed to the beam of history, a beam that gets increasingly powerful as the images of the past take on their universal manifestation. The immediate is then transcended, not in the manner of a Coomaraswamy who would reject the present, but through a dialectical relationship with the larger contemporary.

We see this constantly in the manner in which the epic relates the immediate dramatic to the larger. In the khayal, for instance, this is seen in the way the specificity of the notes themselves, emphasised by the singer, are in constant tension with the overall mood of the composition. And to take the khayal analogy further, deeply embedded within the epic form is the freedom that the artist is able to wrest from the defined conservative tradition. As we see the myth of purely conscious communication take hold on the consumers of mass-art, we also see certain rules of communication that are sought to be embedded within the very traditions of the art-form. Every art-form has its own'forbidden notes' (to borrow a concept from the khayal) some evolved over centuries, others imposed by a rigid tradition, evolved as a guide to the lesser artist in stating the upper limit of the defined tradition. In cinema the accepted patterns of framing, cutting, lensing, the use of time and of space come directly from the analytic-dramatic and the filmmaker, certainly in India, is forbidden from violating these however original he may like to.be with his stories. Freedom from these rules is not however an anarchist breaking of convention; it is, rather, liberty wrested from the complex forces of conservatism by a great artist, the point at which not only he but the entire tradition he represents takes a step forward. And it is usually the case that as the artist explores the higher reaches of his expressive range, his work grows to greater simplicity than in the past, turns more accessible than before. In liberating himself from the rules, the artist frequently liberates his audience from their inhibitions as well, enjoining them to share with him his freedom. With Subarnarekha, we come close to seeing such a level attained. The 1959-62 period was Ghatak's most vital creative phase, when in the space of three years he completed his three films Meghe Dhaka Jara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha. This period was a fertile one, more so because both before after it came long stretches of inactivity: Ajantrik and Bari Theke Paliye his only work for the previous eight years, and a couple of sketches he executed at Pune's Film & TV Institute his only serious films for a decade thereafter before he returned with Titash Ekti Nadir Naam in 1973. It is possible that Ghatak did not really achieve the epic form with Subarnarekha; but this film, seen in the light of his earlier work, discloses a definite epic vision. One of the characteristics of the epic,

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com ing from itsopen-endedness, is its concentric quality, its ability to take on larger and larger myths. Perhaps the best example we have in history is that of Marx himself, who brought such simplicity to Capital after putting Grundrisse behind him, a simplicity that did not preclude the establishment of structures that have withstood onslaughts that Marx could not have known about when he wrote i t The larger myths that are expressed in Subarnarekha are literally large, post-atom bomb myths if one might describe them like that, when a entirely new form of the unknown confronted mankind. Many of the latent forces of destruction of his earlier work, like urbanism for instance, achieve their full expression as the images slice across cultural barriers in showing the history of the.present, of modern civilisation. It is the enormity of the myths themselves that we shall use to arrive at the epic in Subarnarekha, to express both the internal width of the canvas and its continuing relevance twenty years after it was made.

The film spans itself from the childhood of Seeta and the nationalist struggle, Jallianwallah Baghand the murder of Gandhi to her maturity and eventually death as the squalour of the refugee camp becomes the permanent squalour of the city, and the fledgeling mass-media rise to be a dominant force in, society. It also spans itself across Ishwar's own uprightness and confidence in the nationalist bourgeoisie (men like Rambilas) to the destruction of those ideals amid the decadent pleasures of the same class. Most of all, it is a portrayal of the change that has taken place in the country reflecting in Harprasad's own conception of the struggle when he denounces ishwar as a deserter, to his own desertion and cynicism and his realisation that, as he tells Ishwar, 'death does not come so easily". In all of the last three films, Ghatak's point of departure has been the nationalist movement It is clear that despite his criticism of the movement as it later developed, the material aspect of the struggle for Independence has been an important one for him. Indeed, having spent his childhood in the torment and uncertainty of the movement, his disillusionment with the nationalist dream is the first shattering of his idealism. So we have Nagarik made in the wake of the Telengana movement, Meghe Dhaka Tara recalling the past in Tarun babu and the nationalist spirit often introduced obliquely like the children

singing the national anthem, Komal Gandhar establishing the present in the shadow of Ansuya's dead mother and the Noakhali riots. Subarnarekha begins with some kind of function as the leaders of the Nabjiban Colony sit before the national flag. The film introduces Ishwar firmly as coming from Brahmo-samajist social reformism, the tradition of truthful and upright behaviour that was later to tremendously influence Bengali nationalist values. When he meets Rambilas and goes to his house, everything there possesses the prosperity and serenity that recalls the greatness of the Indian, and particularly Bengali, tradition. The sarod recital being enjoyed by the select group of Bengali bhadralok (the upper middleclass), the architecture of the house with its elaborate trellis-work and courtyard, reminiscent of the tradition that Jocasanko (the Tagore family's 19th century residence) for instance stands for today, all these Ishwar finds particularly impressive. Here Rambilas recalls the great names of Bengal 19th century liberalism like Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, and puts forth their ideals to a clearly impressed Ishwar. The establishment of a foundry by Rambilas, his offer of a job to Ishwar, all these represent the very images of progress the latter has visualised for the Indian nation. The only discordant note is that of the sarod in the background being tuned. For the young Seeta, such a new life by the wondrous banks of the Subarnarekha excites all the possibility of a truly new home. The horizons that beckon represent Ishwar's feelings as well. And we are already introduced to two mythic systems: the one enveloping Ishwar and Seeta as they seek their own little comforts, the other larger one of the comfort of the bourgeoisie that we see with Rambilas.

At Rambilas' mansion : Subarnarekha

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Subarnarekha

The environment of the new house is one of violent contradictions. Ishwar's romanticism clashes with the harshness of the foundry outlines as its machines emphasise a very different reality. But even more than this is the new playground of the children: a deserted airstrip and the debris of an airplane, both relicts of the Second World War. The silence that grips us now, as we absorb through the stilled atmosphere the ruins of an airstrip from which bombing missions once took off, is pierced by little Abhiram imitating an aeroplane. The fragile innocence of the children who relate at one level so strongly to the milieu and at another are so ignorant of the violent history of the decrepit structures, suddenly turns frighteningly ominous. This is now so much a part of modern mythology the war of pulp fiction, the idea of vast destruction that so stimulates our imagination that we
have desensitised ourselves completely from ks horrors. "You can call

it by any names" writes Chatak, "the Hydrogen bomb, or Strategic Air Command, or De Gaulle or Adeneur, or some other name you would not like to mention". Unknown to the children, the violence shatters the superficial calm on the soundtrack we hear sounds of airplanes taking off, and suddenly the camera itself gathers speed and looks as if it is about to take off. This becomes realism taken to a superabundance of detail, the realism where its own momentum destroys its evenness. The convention of man actively relating to passive environment into which he reads significance is completely displaced. Here the spectator becomes the man at the joystick looking from the perspective of the destroyer as the environment smashes the calm and the only passivity comes from the human figures at the centre of this upheaval, the children who play on, unaware. Suddenly the environment startles the little girl by producing before her the figure of the terrible Kali. The destruction thus turns archetypal, but then recedes as soon as it appears, and all we see is a poor Bohurupee wanting a coin. Modern myth gives way to ancient myth as the old teacher, tells Seeta the tale of the Ramayana and the adventures of her heroic namesake from the ancient epic. We are recalled the original legend of Seeta, the daughter of the Earth, who returns back to the womb of her mother. The entire milieu of the airstrip thus takes on an interpretation; the wars in the original epic, the supernatural weaponry of Lord Rama exciting a fear mingled with wonder, but more than that the portrayal of protective nature in the epic. Nature in the film that always responds to Seeta's song, later is actually extended to the deserted airstrip as she sits there, in growing darkness, at one with the landscape.

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Subarnarekha

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As childhood gives way to youth, the milieu still remains romantic fprSeeta. The images of her drying her hair, soTagorean in a way we recall Hemnalini drying her hair on the terrace in Nauka dubi or the more archetypal significance of Bimala's hair in Chare Bhaire or sitting alone, singing on the banks of the river as her voice echoes back, are all primarily nostalgic. The split between the closed, self-created mythic world that Ishwar has created to protect himself and his sister, its only occasionally felt Iswar has big plans to send Abhiram to Germany for further studies and to get his sister married off. The only jar.ring note is struck when news comes to him that Harprasad too has left the colony and turned a beggar, with the death of his wife.

Seeta : bubarnarekha

**

The airstrip : Subamarekha

Since the epic form is always very closely in tension with its inner mythic structures, within the epic is expressed the dominant mythic at its most precise. Not only is epic freedom wrested from the dominant tendency to isolate within myth all forms of expression, but it is to a large extent the expression of that struggle. Myth becomes the point against which the epic measures itself, and therefore only Ln this form is myth portrayed as myth. The mythic MonsieurVerdouxin Chaplin's film takes on a universality when in the final shot Verdoux' expression dissolves into that of Charlie's famous tramp. The romantic escapade of the couple in Pierrot Le Fou turns mythical Ferdinand juxtaposed against the archetypal clown Pierrotwhen shown against the densitised violence that surrounds their capers. In particular we should consider here Hiroshima Mon Amour where the reality of Hiroshima and Nevers has been completely sealed off by myth. As the woman says in the film, "The illusion, it's quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry", and later, about the film on'peace'that she has come

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to help shoot in Hiroshima, "They still have some crowd scenes to shoot... We have lots of filmed commercials to sell soap. So... by stressing it, perhaps." These examples bring us to the first principle of epic construction: that of displacement. In both Pierrot and Hiroshima this displacement comes when we realise how much we are conditioned by myth in responding to reality.'In the former this happens when we experience the total inability of the couple to feel beyond, as Marianne says, 'Jules Verne and the detective novel', and the latter when the two characters are themselves unable to respond to the real tragedy of Hiroshima despite the constant bombardment of information on it. Let us move to another form of mythic displacement: Rossellini's use of the, war. Rossellini says, The war itself was an impulse to me: war is a heartfelt experience. If I then moved on from this to the discovery of personality and a deeper study of character, as with the child in Germania Anno Zero or the woman running away in Stromboli, this was part of my natural evolution as a director. Rossellini uses the war as a mythic backdrop to move in close to his characters, to see them without the make-up as it were, and to eventually down the barriers imposed by the bourgeoisie with the warmth of humanism. He describes how for instance, for many months during and after the making of Pa/sa, corpses floating down the river Po with the labels of'partisan' were still being found. For him the entire film was simply a means of making this SGene significant; the film itself is an eloquent demonstration of what it takes to rescue a moment from being mythologised. Rossellini uses the war as a collective experience on an almost archetypal level in the WarTrilogy, and as mentioned earlier, one that even leads to religious experience as in Stromboli.
**

For Ishwarthese come as the first ripples in an otherwise placid life. But his peaceful existence is suddenly shattered when Rambilas comes to his house offering him a partnership, but withdraws it when he sees the presence of a lower-caste (Abhiram) in the house. For Ishwar, who had once so prided himself on his commitment to truth, the prospect of becoming Rambilas' partner is n,ow more important than his earlier liberalism that would have scorned such casteconsciousness. Unaware, he is absorbed into the ruling-class.

Ishwar: Subarnarekha

Seeta's elopement with Abhiram on the very day of her wedding represents the final crumbling of his little mythic world. And this destruction is shown through just one epic gesture when Ishwar makes a ball of the newspaper showing Yuri Gagarin's photograph and a report of his successful mission in outer space, and throws it into the foundry furnace. With the entire airstrip sequence Ghatak has built a mythic, complex, where primordial images are juxtaposed against contenv porary ones. As this gets gradually defined around Ishwar and Seeta, takes concrete shape unknown to them, we come to recognise what the implications would be were its surface to-be ripped off and its falseness exposed. What is the nature of the complex fight of an individual who, perhaps unable to comprehend the processes of change, nevertheless struggles against the crumbling ruins of a mythology that has sustained him for his entire life ? We are now moving beyond

Full of his own visions of new horizons in Calcutta, Abhiram decides not to go to Germany. He wants to become a writer. As he and Seeta declare their feelings for each other, the Kalavathi 'Aaj ki ananda' echoes through the forest and across the river.

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individual myth, and into the realm where myth is the main strength that shores up a larger tradition. We have seen in Ghatak's work the explosion of mythic energy into larger recognition. In Subarnarekha the shock waves that radiate forth from such recognition go beyond momentary expression; they are sustained over the entire last section of the film as Ghatak leads them to their logical denouement. The basic sensibility of the modern has been severely shaken bythe blows dealt to man's conception of time and space by scientific breakthroughs. The particular relation of man to his environment the space over which he extends his identity no longer holds valid, and consequently the dominant archetypes of the past no longer express the mythic forms of the present We now have a very different mythology, dominated by very different images of the past Childhood symbols of protection, the spontaneous response to the environment and the lack of guilt in the perception of scars of past history on it, all these in adulthood give way to a desperate search for security. The creaking window that announces Harprasad's return when Ishwar is about to hang himself indicates just how much intrusion from outside now threatens Ishwar's existence. Ghatak does not want to be too specific about the forces that threaten this search for security. But we could get them from the gesture of throwing the newspaper if we were to fragment it into its minute symbols (always bearing in mind that such gestures by their very nature cannot be linearly fitted to exact meaning). The foreman who brings the newspaper is a comic figure, trivial today, but we remember that in the end it is he who replaces Ishwar in his job; the newspaper itself represents an intrusion from the world outside, and

Subarnarekha

as such a threat; Yuri Gagarin, the space age, is all part of modern mythology, the myths that we have already encountered with little Abhiram imitating an airplane on the airstrip Ishwar refusing to let this affect him thus clings fiercely to his old myths, while the new ruling-class absorbs all the change that takes place in society; the furnace, into which he throws the paper, is for him an entirely tamed servant, but as with the ol.d. archetypes destined to grow and to consume its master. It would be interesting to speculate on why Ghatak has used a character like Ishwar at the centre of the conflict for at a superficial level he appears to be of the very class that the bourgeoisie has bypassed, who survives by keeping away from the crisis of the middleclass. It is not he who seems to be at the centre of the absorption by the dominant ruling class of scientific warfare and the myths that accompany it. But it is perhaps this very reason that puts Ishwar at the centre in Ghatak's view for he is the inheritor of Bengali middleclass liberalism and the nationalist dream, and he is therefore the main victim as well, further, Ghatak defines the newarchetypes not in their more conventional realist setting, but in juxtaposition with the older archetypes. Ishwar, perhaps because of his inability to feel the new forces, falls precisely between the two and represents the most clearly the changing character of the dominant value-system. Put simply, it could only be through him that Sanskrit slokas may be recited in a night-club. Let us turn to Seeta The vigorous camera movement through the forest as Abhiram and Seeta meet is nature reflecting the the unexpressed passion the two feel for each otHer. But the camera swinging away into a Seeta still decked up in her bridal finery, after showing her headdress bobbing down the river, establishes a different relation to nature. The dream has turned to reality, and it is very different from the dream. We then see their one-room tenement, as the rain pours down on the courtyard. We hear a snatch of the raga Gaud Malhar, now displaced completely from its original context Abhiram's dreams of becoming a writer come to nothing, and he is forced to join the ranks of the proletariat When he wonders aloud as to whether they should ask Ishwar for help, Seeta mildly suggests that people would pay a lot of money to hear her sing. Abhiram dies a sudden, violent death. It is, as Tarun babu would have said, 'expected'; but for Ghatak if such an end was Inevitable, it

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was not in the sense of a condemnation of the forces that proletarianise, but one that permits him to show the manifestation of ritual destruction in the new milieu. The earlier archetypal images of destruction take on a terrifying contemporariness when a drunk Ishwar pays money to hear his own sister sing. As he faces her, his sister and mother, in incestuous relationship, all traditional images of the feminine principle lie destroyed before him. The last hold of a sanity that clings to the eternal hope of salvation through a return to the Mother's protection, is now destroyed before the commercialism of the new civilisation that would respect no relationships. And lying in destruction with this is also the classical tradition, the music of the protective landscape, now devolved into a commodity like any other. Soon after, a journalist comes to interview Ishwar. Harprasad tells the journalist who has asked him whether he thought Ishwar was a martyr"If you want to be a martyr you have to first die a dog's death.

Abhiram faces his dead mother: Subamarekha

The return of Harprasad

Subamarekha

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You have to stand up and say Mata! Daar Kholo!" (Mother! Open the Door!) To confront reality in its raw form, to discover the grotesque forces let loose by our ruling-class in its ravages, one has to overcome the protective beliefs that we have covered ourselves with from our birth. It is literally to live on the edge of death until a new identity is discovered that would revive us all, return us to health. The loss of a home is veritably the state of an orphan; the alienated state from nature in the city is one that leads to grotesque distortion of images that have sustained mankind from time immemorial. We have seen how the relation of the child to nature is disturbed as the young Seeta plays on the tarmac unaware of its violent history. Her own son later imitates an engine and in the same rhythm chants ami nutan badi jaai (I'm off to a new home); when his mother is dead and when he is with his uncle, his cry of Ma! echoes through the house. Abhiram loses his mother in the beginning of the film and, at the point where he is about to sever his link with protective nature, encounters her once more under terrible circumstances. She lies dying on the railway platform, and as he stares at her, Ghatak underlines the catastrophic nature of the event by swinging his camera down the platform in a savage tracking shot.
**

Much of this falls into place when we see the work of Federico FeJIini and the mythic backdrop to his work. The enormous heights in Amarcord, the entire last sequence of 81/2 building to its frenetic pace, and particularly the sequence of the miracle in La Dolce Vita leading to the stampede, capture the frenzied search for salvation. Fellini places his characters at times almost mercilessly in a historical context. One figure that reappears in his work is the huge, oversexed woman. But such a woman, a product of the infantilism of modern culture, in La Dolce Vita is shown with the satyr dancing in the backdrop of the Roman baths to a fast jazz tune from recent popular culture. The decadence'of the Via Veneto is suddenly seen to be also part of the frantic search, but in the end of the film as the woman strips her clothes to the same tune of Patricia we see how this search for protection, the return to the Mother, has now degenerated into the reduction of the female principle to the state of a prostitute. It is in Fellini's work that we see expressed the inversion of reality and fantasy in modern romaticism: the wasteland, its link with the dream, the kind of shapes that dominate modern imagination. But most importantly, we once more see the link here between archetypal construction and narrative when we see how Fellini is able to stretch out the momentary and the spontaneous over such length that even its expressionism gives-way to purely stylised form. Subarnarekha shares with Fellini a sensibility that we may describe as a post-World War one. We can see this by observing the way it uses images of the specifically modern to clash conflicting myths against each other. Let us first understand this by taking the example of the Yuri Gagarin sequence, and as a parallel to it, two other epic scenes: the Vietnam scene in Pierrot Le Fou and the one in the bar-room in Ozu'sAn Autumn Afternoon. In the first, we have Ferdinand dressed as an American naval officer, Marianne as a Vietnamese, and as they begin their little playletthe camera moves close to Ferdinand imitating a bombing raid with the help of matchsticks, and then cuts to a documentary shot of an actual raid. In the second we have a group of drinkers talking, reminiscing about th'e war, and an ex-sergeant who says, " It's because we lost that the kids are all shaking their behinds dancing this rockabilly thing. But it we'd won, then all the blue-eyed foreigners would have been wearing geisha wigs and chewing gum while plunking out tunes on the samisen", to which the father replies, "Then it's lucky we lost".

In the last thirty years, the period following the Second World War or, to be more specific, following the first use of atomic weaponry, man has come to display an increasing lack of balance, an almost terminal recklessness. The frantic desire to live only for the moment, to cling on to a value-system all the more viciously as its contradictions widen, and the attempt to resolve the crisis of identity through a preoccupation with bigness, sheer mind-boggling size, this is a characteristic of rootless urban culture everywhere. Modern architecture builds bigger and bigger; modern mythology has grown to such size that the heroic figure of commercial cinema cannot be shown except through widescreen and multichannel sound. The sense of competition as the only creative outlet, and consequently the only means that seems to offer salvation, has culminated in the superpowers competing to capture outer space in bigger and more grandiose experiments than ever before in the past

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In all three, one can immediately note the significant use of tradition within the epic structure. In Pierrot, this is seen in the lack of a tradition and consequently a violently assertive form of narration as Godard inserts shots of comic books, paperback novels and war photographs. Imitation here clashes with reality, the self-created world of pop culture is contrasted against the actual reality of its content. Ozu is permitted by the strong Japanese tradition to be even more violent. The extremely sparse canvas and eleborate detailing of the little customs of the Japanese people establishes very strongly a dominant relation with his characters; consequently the mere introduction of an element that suggests a different, a more violent past as does the song 'Floating Fortresses'), rebounds off these elaborate rituals into sharp exposure of their mythic character. In all three films, it is the extent of the divide between an individual's superficial reality his daily rituals of living, the mythic system that sustains him and the super-human mythology that engulfs him

as he seeks to keep it out. It is perhaps not a coincidence that all the films draw this from the experience of war, for war is one of the largest myths that today threaten the secure world of the individual. One can even notice an almost Tarkovskian quality to Chatak's images: the abandoned airstrip, in its expression of waste and desolation, inescapably recalls the 'zone' of The Stalker. In fact, Subarnarekha defines this further by explicitly relating the destruction to Kali. Even more startling is the strange parallel one can draw between the drive through Calcutta where the street lights blur before tne drunken eyes of the passengers, and the drive in Solaris. The connection may be seen, not as dramatic but as a lyrical one, and it will perhaps be recognised if we place in between the two Codard's shot of the car driving through the mythical city of Alphaville as the streetlights flash off its windscreen. Certain Indian traditions of larger-than-life protrayal as in Kathakali definitely take on a strange relevance within the context of the present Their archetypal images of the terrible are really very appropriate images of much of the destruction, that is all round us. Ghatak draws from these to give archetypal dimension to contemporary reality. He can do so because the more important reverse process of giving contemporary form to be archetype has already occurred in Meghe Dhaka Tara and thus permitted him to return to realism with the widened canvas. In Meghe Dhaka Tara we see Neeta gradually elevated to iconic proportions; here we see realist conventions of portrayal extracted and stretched out so that the images they communicate grow in size. There is a distinct connection between the two, a connection that becomes clear with Federico Fellini, who so magnificently uses the latter form, mentioning as one of the images of modern decadence the Goddess Kali. As the links grow more firm, we come inexorably to the scene of the night clubbibhatsa maja, as Harprasad tells Ishwar (bibhatsa is one of the navarasas and indicates disgust). We cannot obviously see the sheer physicality of Fellini's shapes, but within their own range the scenes do come close to classic Fellini structures. The stylisation begins with the race course scene where with the voice of the excited commentator we also hear a floating khayal melody. The experience is already being detached through elevation

The night-club sequence : Subarnarekha

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to a musicality; very much a Fellini structure. This gives way to the nightclub, where the droning of the Sanskrit s/ofcas that the two trade with each other mingles with the lively Patricia as modern decadence clashes with ancient classicism. The slokas here do exactly what the Renaissance sculpture of Rome does in La Dolce Vita when Sylvia wades through the fountain with rugged figures hewn in stone behind her. At the brothel, when Ishwar sees his own sister killed before him, Chatak shifts convention. When he enters, we hear a snatch of Patricia. But from the moment Seeta recognises him, there is a complete change of mood, and likewise complete change in shottaking. There is an extreme close up of Seeta's eyes, a shot of the scythe raised, sudden blood, a shot of only her hands as Ishwar is seen in reflection in a mirror, a total silhouette of Ishwar holding the same weapon, and then only spots of light against the black screen starkly isolating IshwaKs body. This is an expressionism that has almost certainly been drawn from the gigantic imagery of the folk forms. One may not be able to directly state the source, but one can recall how the Chhou sequence mjukti Takko Ar Cappo is preceded by Bongobala wearing the mask of Durga; Bongobala's heavy breathing, the stilted movement of the demon (which ishwar exactly duplicates as he walks out) and the mask which in Jukti Takko itself is elsewhere evoked by the sheer stream of white light on the face (when Neelkantha sits beneath the window in the beginning) that reduces facial contours by giving it a pallor, As we link the two traditions we also recognise the direction towards which the expressionist gesture in Chatak's work was moving. Initially meant to break through the realist veneer, it gradually began confronting realist conventions on steadily deeper levels as it inverted many of the realist relations. At its most significant, which we only glimpse \n Subarnarekha, the imagery and the narrative had started relating to traditions that long preceded bourgeois realism, often by many centuries, as we shall see in the following chapter where they are sought to be traced to their origins. This becomes evident with the changing nature of the images he worked with. The machines, those ominous invaders of the countryside in Ajantrik images that had already begun approximating to the archetypalled on to the human figure itself in Meghe Dhaka Tara. With Subarnarekha the vision has widened, the two major influences

Brother encounters sister in the (itv : Subarnarekha

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Towards A Materialism Of Cinema

Images, figures, masks : Subarnarekha, lukti Takko Ar Cappo

on the film were the images of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Rabindranath Tagore's Shishu Tirtha with which poem he ends the film. Both are important because they give us an idea of the vision he worked with in the film. Eliot'sjuxtaposingof the"Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" with directly archetypal images "Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair/Spread out in fiery points"and the archetypes themselves in 'What the Thunder Said', which is directly drawn by Subarnarekha, emerges from the same apocalyptic vision that seems to move Fellini towards his visual structures. Forms at once mysterious and foreboding and a destructiveness that only recalls the ancient images of death, the spatial conception of the wasteland itself, are all preoccupations of the modern, the specifically modern. The film ends the celebrated lines from Shishu Tirtha: "Victory to Man, the New-born, the Ever-living". In that poem Rabindranath too takes us through a long and winding path where we encounter the clash of cultures, the recurring images of childhood, of the Bengali land, pain and discovery. As Ishwar trudges to the excited encouragement of the child egging him on, the exact sentiments of the poem, of a hope through defeat, and the life-assertion in the search itself, are repeated.

If, as mentioned earlier, the purpose of this present study on Ritwik Ghatak expressly avoids passing judgement over him, it must also be added that nor does it seek to make him the inflexible centre of a larger theoretical position. I fan attempt is made to establish a context to Chatak's work, it can only be through one that dialectically relates an artist to his time. As the artist relates to a larger tradition, it becomes vital that neither consume the other, for that is the first step of fascist domination. It becomes vital therefore that specificity and larger signification draw from each other while being in constant tension, that the significance of an individual's work be given its individuality, but in terms of the tradition which it perpetuates. We see Ghatak's point of departure as the romantic splintering of the values adopted by a people, from their material existence. Modern romanticism of the sort that we have received from the past, is for him specifically defined thus, for as he repeatedly shpws, sensuous response to nature within a very different tradition is certainly not prevented from be"ing an entirely materialist one, possessing all the possibilities of extending to a larger world-view. He is in fundamental disagreement with the idea that men like Bimal in Ajantrik are necessarily anachronisms within modern capitalism, believing that given a chance to grow every culture can move to the capitalist mode without destroying its own traditions. The dominance of petty-b(3urgeois aspiration among the lower classes is because the images that have emerged from their material culture have been rendered-meaningless by a process of absorption that has gone on ever since surplus value created in society a ruling class. This entire position, and the use of ancient archetypes towards definingan alternate sensibility, is in its very nature fraught with peril, one in which even subtle changes in emphasis can lead to the fascist position. For instance anthropocentrism taken to excessive preoccu-

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pation with the immediate human experience is in its very nature fascist, while a transcendentalism which robs all objects of their own sensuousness and thus destroys the material response also leads to similar fascist domination. The intricacy of the mythic structure, and its enormous pitfalls should be evident by now. Likewise, as we have repeatedly seen, what seems to be an excessively materialist positionone that often passes for a Marxist oneleads to dominance of theme and permits all manner of manipulation from allegedly progressive artists. The arguments against the formalist position are well-known. As we widen the alternate tradition to which Chatak belongs, it would be necessary to see the manner in which Chatak himself borrows from the tradition before we recognise his contribution to it. We have been able to establish thus far a rough-and-ready definition of the relationship between narrative and image within the dramatic and the epic. Let us now put it on more firm ground with the help of the most solid materialist thinker within the tradition, Karl Marx. "Creek art, "Marx wrote, "presupposes Creek mythology, in other words that natural and social phenomena are already assimilated in an unintentionally artistic manner by the imagination of the people."29 Marx therefore establishes quite clearlythe division of the unified social sensibility: into natural and social phenomena, their assimilation into imagination and into mythology, and their expression as art. He elaborates how at each level, non-dialectical imposition of expression upon existence can lead to class-domination. The most basic act of expression, the interaction between man and his environment, comes through labour. The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on whrch his labour is realised, in which it-is active, and from which and by means of which it produces.30 Such an act is fundamentally a creative act, a proof ot man as a species-being. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal's product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and

the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the law of beauty." Marx thus establishes his first significant image; labour, which is the objectification of material creation from the beginning of civilisation, is itself the objectification of his creative urge, his desire to recreate nature. This image possesses not only a historical truth, but in achieving a concrete, tangible interpretation, it makes the worker himself a ware of labour, what it /s instead of merely what it does. Every significant human creation from the great works of art to assemblyline production is thus an embodiment of labour, and labour itself the expression of human existence. In class-society man is alienated from the product of his labour. It is like the estrangementof expression from being. And as !h<? product of his labour becomes an alien object, his "relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature" is also alienated. The first consequence of this is the isolated individualestranged labour, instead of establishing man as a species-being, is converted into a means of his individual existence. He is unable to recognise the product of his labour as his own. This pattern of false individuation is sought to be explained away with a variety of means as it extends to a larger ideological position. The first is usually that creation of convention: ...if it be declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the regime of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called universal consent of mankind...Unable to account for the puzzling forms assumed by social relations between man and man, people sought to denude them of their strange'appearan'ce by ascribing to them a conventional origin." Very early on, in his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Marx had elaborated in considerable detail the problems of expression of reality in material terms, and the manner in which a false

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position is perpetuated through certain forms of expression. The process of inversion, of making mystical, is the replacement of reality with the idea of reality: "Reality is expressed not as itself but as another reality. Ordinary empirical fact has not its own but an alien spirit for its law..."1' Marx details the means of inversion: finite becomes infinite, concrete becomes abstract. "The condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product...", and elsewhere "When the idea is made the subject, however, the real subjects...become unreal objective elements of the idea with a changed significance". He then comes directly to narrative, showing how in its expression this process of destroying concreteness before abstraction takes place when the subject and the predicate are inverted. Had actual mind been made the starting point, the 'general purpose' would have been its content, the various authorities its mode of self-realisationits real or material existence, whose specific character could have been explained from the very nature of its purpose. Because, however, the 'idea' or 'substance' as subject, as actual essence, is made the starting point, the real subject appears only as the last predicate of the abstract predicate.34 In a wide sweep, Marx then shows the connections: ideality, emphasised instead of the material position, leads to 'subjectification' of man into abstract concepts such as the state instead of the state being the objectification of man. It then automatically leads to the justification of private ownership of property since that too becomes abstract and subjectified. And this brings him to the phenomenon of rendering mystical the material images from the past. (A) consequence of this mystical speculation is thai a particular empirical existent, one individual empirical existent in distinction from others, is regarded as the embodiment of the idea. Again, it makes a deep mystical impression to see a particular empirical existent posited by the idea, and thus to meet at every stage an incarnation of Cod. This one might describe as the historical counterpart of ritualismthe seperation of the image from its original context is also achieved by

the imposing of a larger image upon the individual element. If class differentiation is thus congealed in this imposition, the inability of man to relate to his traditions and his own class-identity becomes its extension into time. It becomes obvious that within Marx's perception of the interaction between man and nature is also embedded somewhere a materialist definition of realism. As the identity of man the individual took precedence over man the species-being, this also led to a certain convention of portraying the individual. This was when isolated man replaced the archetypal heroic figure of the middle-ages, as the splintering of myth from reality and both of them from the artist as individual took place. With the Renaissance, increased emphasis was given to perspective and correspondingly lesser to passionate portrayal in the religious sense. It is obvious that the extension of mythic narrative to realist portrayal became more and more difficult, so that in the West with the gradual ascendence of realist considerations, the two are almost entirely split Romanticism itself being a reassertion of the individual, the attempt at unification remained an illusory one, as we can see in its contemporary manifestation: in popular art, and in the expression of alienation from the present. The inability to reconcile mythic portrayal to external realism is thus an extension of alienation: It is precisely through the universal archetypes, the collective unconscious' that man can reassert himself as a species being, overcome the forces that isolate him. We are at present tacing the terrible bankruptcy of possessing neither the sophisticated response to myth that our forefathers possessed nor a strong realist tradition, for realism too, unless it considers larger possibilities of signification is by itself relevant only to certain social conditions, as for instance when it opens out the insularity of the middle-classes. The answer is seen in the manner in which Marx uses the image of labour as the 'objectification of man's species-life'. It is one instantly identifiable by the exploited class, but it cannot be easily absorbed into bourgeois culture since it is too deeply rooted in the material struggle. Further, it directly relates the present to history for the great creations of the past are suddenly seen not as magical objects that fell from the heavens (as they are often characterised) hut as the result of labour. Most significant however is the way Marx defines labour as a form of interaction with nature, as an expression of humanism. It is at this point, in relation to the others, that the image

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becomes larger, becomes in fact the first major archetype of the alternate tradition. Marx consistently provides new archetypes for the proletariat in this manner: the machine for instance. His images in the Future Results of British Rule in India where he speaks of 'idyllic village communities' being destroyed by the 'juggernaut' that is the railway, 'truly the forerunner of modern industry", and of steam and the free press as some kind of gigantic forces conquering all, are stunningly evocative. But even more relevant are the images Engels uses in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific where he counters the destructive and Iiberatingaspectsof the machine, and portrays the quiet violence the modern industrial revolution in conflict with an entirely opposite vision of society and civilisation. This is exactly the tradition within which Rossellini works inhisuseofthe profound experience of war, and Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin and October. Here images dominate, overcoming both the passivity of realism and the stranglehold of narrative, and in their affectivity begin approximating to the archetypal. We are now once more coming to the meeting-place of two traditions, that of modern realism and the more ancient one of the epic. Let us see the figurative significance of Bunuel's Nazarin in its final shot of the priest holding the pineapple. As the camera closes in on Nazario's face, his entire conflict in the film gets summarised, wrested from its narrative bindings, and is made permanent through the image. The tension between the figural and the symbolic is very often expressed by the tension between the momentary-dynamic arid the timeless. Where painting and sculpture have constantly sought to bting dynamism to the temporally static image, cinema now seeks to extract from its temporality as less time-bound, more permanent image. The process is the reverse, but the intention the same, that of taking an image to higher reaches of significance. Marx himself, without the benefit of the Freudian layingopen of the unconscious, seems to have subscribed to the older belief that knowledge would be the destruction of mythology: "All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them". 3 ' Today however, as we seek to elevate the image to .the archetype, we see how the unconscious is like a maze with images from the immediate to the timeless

dominating it. The simple image belongs to the primary level of an imprint, a visual expression of what is felt within. This could be the fusion of individual imprints received from childhood, the larger mythic imprints of the various phases of growth of the child, and the most recent ones representing the identity of the individual. In their artistic expression, these move beyond their individuality and approximate to those that emerge through collective activity. And it is this activity, within which also comes the work of the artist, that the images expressed become larger, achieve a universal form. The narrative structure is fundamental to this transformation. The images have to move beyond the dramatic; they have to therefore attain a dynamism quite independent of the temporally defined. It is the major limitation of modern art-forms that they are usually unable to move beyond simple imagery and into the more fixed, and yet dynamic timelessness of the grand icons of the past. And this is precisely the. pointimage extends to archetype almost necessarily through the figurative because this has been the means of archetypal expression throughout the history of such portrayal. We now see the significance of Bunuel's image. Even as the individual Nazario is bound in chains, the image is freed. The Christ archetype of suffering and release is replayed, but to a very different context. As the drums grow louder, we realise a different significance of both the arrest and the nature of the release. One may now turn to the use of the human figure in Meghe Dhaka Tara. The still on next page comes just after the rabindra sangeet sequence, in the film. In this both the particular angle of seeing and the contours of the face sets off very specific associations: such elevation within the Indian traditions of iconic portraiture usually indicates a serenity, a majesty. The scale itself evokes a grandeur, but the tensions are controlled, drawn into the overall mood. In her essay Partisan Views About the Human Figure Ceeta Kapur points out how within the perception of the world in the Indian mythic system, the human figure is central to the composition. In its own way...the human presence obsesses the Indian imagination as much as it does the Egyptian, the Creek and the Christian. For while in Indian philosophy human existence is placed within a plenitude of life, from vegetal growth to cosmic forces, ft is in the human form that the immanent energies of

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H
'0'' .' .Vi:T'"

Meghe Dhaka lara

nature are maximised. The evolution of the archaic Yaksha figure into the splendid iconic presence of the Bodhisattva and the Buddha is notonlyan example of the morphology of form, as it is usually considered, but the effluence of the life-spirit. If it is argued that the Yaksha and the Buddha are other than strictly human it should be said thatthis is nearly always so in Indian art The otherness in nature or man that sets up a series of confrontations in the Western imagination is here always incorporated into the human image.36 We may now be able to restructure the lines of tension within Meghe Dhaka lara to reveal yet another dimension. We can now observe the portrayal of the feminine character ranging from the human embodiment of natural forces (in the beginning of the film) to her gradual elevation to iconic proportions. The continuing line is in relation to nature. It is an underlying language of pure form, the

representation of the human figure at its most basic and most universal. At one level the images have the tremendous vibrancy of a Ram Kinkermany have pointed out the possible influence on Chatak's figures of the Bengali sculptor who worked with bronze, stone and concrete, hewing his materials into a powerful life-assertiveness. But then as the image takes on its iconic presence, this gives way to stillness, that is the final expression of the tragic narrative. And in this growth, as Ghatak re-establishes links with the life-spirit of the great icons, he also raises the images of the material response to nature to classical form. This is the growth of the image that accompanies the classicism of the tragic structure and, in the narrative, the use of another classical tradition, the khayal. We can now see the imagedevoid of all embellishment, drained of a natural vitality, all that is left below are the stark outlines of the human figure drawn from nature itself. And this has its own grandeur, that is discovered in the materiality of the image. Immediately after rising to such a presence, Neeta breaks down sobbing uncontrollablythe mask is off, the individual revealed. Struggling against the dense, subterranean forces of bondage, Chatak reveals them through a structural duality that permits in the image a recognition of the contemporary struggle, and simultaneously recalls the complex relation of the icon to nature and to human emotion, the material tradition of such portrayal. From image, then, to narrative, and here we see another distinctive use of tradition. Satyajit Ray has at one point written that one of the main problems of the Indian filmmaker with narrative is "the absence of a dramatic narrative tradition in Indian music". It is valid to speak of a Beethoven symphony in terms of a universal brotherhood, or man's struggle against faith or the passionate outpourings of a soul in torment Western classical music underwent a process of humanization with the invention of the sonata formwith masculine first "subject and feminine second subjects and their interweaving and progress through a series of dramatic key-changes, to a point of culmination. But a raga is a ragawith a single pre-determined mood and tonalitythat is, built up like a temple, startingfrom a solid base of alap, culminating in a spire of flourishes on the lighter

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i

octaves on the scales. Perhaps one could, with some stretch of imagination, think of a film subject that might be built up like the development of a raga, but I cannot think of this as a form with wide appreciation." Ray's conception of the linear narrative is clearly one that accepts the principle o f unfoJding', the traditional slow revealing of subject so that the climax coincides with the point of complete recognition. In this the temporal aspect is all-important, each movement defined by its duration. While this form has in cinema been a widely-accepted one, it can also be seen as the one that led to the stranglehold of the linear narrative, the very stranglehold that the alternate tradition that we have accepted here has sought to overcome. Eisenstein first outlined his principle of montage-as-conflict precisely in opposition to the 'unrolling' principle. And in retent times we can see the circularity of structure in Fellini (seen the most clearly in 8V2) and the use of image in Bunuel as direct confrontations to precisely the linear and temporally-defined narrative. In fact it is the very quality of the khayal that Ray feels is its limitationin the way it establishes the entire image in the very beginning, and only then expounds on its various aspectthat makes it significant for cinema and, as we speak of him, for Ghatak. The tragic form itself works that way: the dimensions of the experience to follow are stated in the very beginning, and the followed by the experience itself made purer by the elimination of the inconsequential in the dramatic. Such a structure as the khayal is in fact able to establish contradictory tensions because it moves beyond the linearity of dramatic narrative. In Chatak's narrative structure, there is a reoeated breaking forth into the expressionist gesture. The gesture however is only the point of intervention, the point at which the author underlines his involvement in a sequence. The sequence itself usually develops a significance outside of the dramatic unfolding of events in the main story, one that it is exceptionally difficult to justify within an overall scheme that does admit to a beginning and an end. Within the Sequences themselves, one can further discover contradictory tensions operating: a dominant, the basic rhythmthe members of the troupe enjoying themselves on the Padma, or the children playing on the airstriparound which are introduced certain emphases. The intervention comes as something outside of these, a commentative device that comes between us and the scene we have witnessed.

One can quite definitely trace this narrative to the khayal form in which, after the basic rhythm is defined even the percussion accompaniment departs from it, and the singer himself introduces his own emphases that fit dialectically into the other rhythmic structures. The singer's interpretation of the bandish is a personal element that advances and recedes before the overall mood of the raga. At times the khayal is directly used, the growth of the Hamsadhwani in Megha Dhaka Tara chronicling Shankar"s growth as a singer, or the Karim Naam Tero coming first in the alap and then, some time later in the film, the mad'hya. In this itself he uses its content in different ways, as for instance the Hamsadhwani composition in the middle of the film being Jai Maate Vilumbh Taj De which is an invocation to the Mother. But the use of the khayal, in providing a structure of narrative, goes beyond this and into the overall narrative of the film. The emotional range in the films for instance is from the khayal, from the deep and the sonorous to the light, joyous mood, with alternative emphasising on the full-blooded and the transcendental. Equally, the establishing of the stamp of individuality while relating to the traditionsomething that very rew art-forms today possessis also a freedom that he draws from the khayal. But it can possibly be taken even furtherand here we come to Subarnarekha and Fellink Where a filmmaker like Codard, denied any kind of tradition, comes to avant-gardism and to a jazz structure, Fellini brings into the present certain very distinctive traditions. In his visual form itself, in the way he can link a childhood sense of wonder with enormous heightsthe attractions of the circuswith forms like the commedia dell'arte, Fellini establishes a musicahty of structure. This permits a narrative, never linear, at intervals to accelerate and suddenly whip off tangentially in complete violation of all laws of linearity. It is possible to comprehend Fellini's narrative only in musical terms as an orchestration of gesture, visual form and sound. With Megha Dhaka Tara Chatak had clearly established the link between montage and the khayal form, and repeatedly extended the khayal inter-relationships spatially. In Subarnarekha we have seen how he moves further, drawingail his rhythmic elements from realism while completely breaking up its evenness, juxtaposing them with images.of an entirely different tradition, and in this arriving from completely different origins to Fellini-like structures. We should now see how, in the absence of the visual power of Fellini, Ghatak works towards a similar orchestration of elements.

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He does it by opening out the traditions of portrayal of man and nature to now express the grinness of the present, to invert the rasas that usually bring out the sensual to now emphasise bibhatsa, as Harprasad says in the film. Malhar now indicates the filthy rain in the city; the two drunken revellers ask the waiter with liquor whether it is amruta (nectar). The tensions of the khayal now open out, with the nature that is always strongly evoked now becoming the city, and the protective landscape now the airstrip; the swaras now intermingle with the harsh sounds of the city; the delicate emphases of the artist himself now come as increasingly violent and more sustained interventions. Lacking the physical images of a Fellini, Chatak establishes equally strong images aesthetically, and when he does bring in the physical imagethe Kali figureit is specifically archetypal. The archetypal image, established in such a context, comes into dialectical interaction with the other, more realist images in the film. It is really the extreme'point, the actual physical expression of an image that has already been introduced lyrically. Through his drawing of image and narrative from mythic forms of expression, he is able to create an image for the present which is easily identifiable, and also to relate it to history. We may now see this form of narrative as one that directly adopts narrative compositions of past mythic systems. It is the artistic equivalent of a figurative historicism, the historicism that would reconcile what men like Coomaraswamy separatedrationalism with sensuousness, historic chronicling of events with historical materialism. Kosambi, in his Introduction to the Study of Indian History, starts with the assertion that "history is defined as the presentation...of successive developments in the means and relations of production", and then relies fora substantial section of his book on purely mythic sources, which include the Mother Goddess cult-sites round his house in Poona. Even as Ghatak portrays modern alienation, thus, his narrative pattern seeks to overcome it, to reconcile myth with history, to arrive at the epic. And so the epic vision is revealed to us. Myth has through history been the repository of our materialist tradition; today, as we glimpse into its complex maze, we see within it our past come alive. How do we then open it out, reveal its content to the people? Our ancient' forefathers knew the secret, and whether it was the tragic form, the khayal or other classical forms, their art possessed the master-key that

had laid bare the rarest treasures of the vast mythic storehouse. Myth held no secrets from them. It has been only after Marx pointed out the lacuna that we have been consciously aware of the loss of this key. All art today screams out its loss, and searches for the completion, the unity that we once possessed. Ghatak's work is important because of the way it returns to the epic, to a form that has been dormant for centuries. Obviously it does not do so by itself, standing atop a hundred years of the realist tradition, Tagore, Eisenstein, Brecht and the great filmmakers ot our time like Bunuel and Fellini. Drawing his momentum from these, Ghatak launched out on what we have already described as an extremely perilous journey, and as we see, came close to a new vision of the epic. Unfortunately, while his work held out, he himself could not, and succumbed to the pressures of such creation. The new direction however, towards a cinematic materialism, stands as fresh as when he first pointed it out.

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CHAPTER FOUR

After Ghatak
almost titanic battle he waged first to make films and then to survive, is what gives his tradition strength as much as do his actual cinematic achievements. At a certain intensity of working, there sometimes takes place a coincidingof the inner turbulence of the artist, reflected in his subject, and the structure, the tradition within which he works. An example of such a coinciding is the film Sant Tukaram made by Fathelal/Damle for the Prabhat Studio. The kind of intensity they brought, which sprang directly from the materiality of the faith that surrounded the Bhakti movement, gave an amazing simplicity to the structure and to the portait of the legendary saint The film achives an incredible merging of the material with the metaphysical as it draws directly from the simple poetry of the saint himself into its cinematic structure. Tukaram is an important film for us, particularly if we were to try and state a Ghatak tradition in the country, not only because of Ghatak's

"Somehow I fcei alcohol is the final road to salvation, engrossed in it, I really do"Ritwik Ghatak

get

Having put behind us the more theoretical of issues that concern Ritwik Chatak's work, we may now with some freedom turn briefly to one of the most extraordinary films of recent times lukti Takko Ar Cappo. Completed just a year before his death, made in a manner that was perhaps the only possible one given his condition, it is a strange, terrifying document of a man dragging into consciousness that part of the unknown within us that we still fear. For us who withdraw into privacy, who cover ourselves with protective layers unable to trust our instincts, the sight of a man baring himself to the world is still an almost primordial one, a hallucinatory experience almost impossible to accept unless we have readied ourselves, and yet strangely liberating. Through the late sixties, as filmmaking became more and more difficult, Chatak took to.narrating the themes he had in mind to film. His students at the Film Institute recall their sheer scale, their ambitiousness, for by now the archetype had seeped into the minutest of gestures and camerawork. The only obvious thing about them was that he would physically never have been able to realise them on screen. His alcoholism had taken him over, drawn him into its coils, rendering him incapable of exercising even the least control or discipline. For any man this would have been a private matter, but Ghatak chose to make it public when he made jukti Takko Ar Cappo. Why he should do so it is difficult to say, but as we attempt today to return to his work, to rescue it from being drawn into the romantic tradition for Ghatak is today ripe for acclaim from even the most conservative sections, as being one of the great romantic figures of Indian cinema, the 'forgotten genius' etcwe realise how little there is on the polemical level with which to confront this attack except for what Ghatak has himself left behind. The tortuous path that Ghatak led, the

lukti Takko Ar Cappo

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own acceptance of its importance within his own work but also because of its influence on the filmmakers who would belong to such a tradition, particularly Mani Kaul. Kumar Shahani, whose Maya Darpan was the first major film to consciously extend Chatak's position, in an essay points out the strange resemblance of Chatak's own performance in jukti Takko Ar Cappo with Sant Tukaram in the way subject-matter transforms into form and the simplicity the two bring to this transformation. "Such simplicity can rarely be repeated, even by the authors themselves" he writes, "The transformation of way subject-matter transforms into form and the simplicity the two most cases, the aspiration itself is not dangerous."38 If Fathelal and Damle were not consciously aware of the historical forces at work in their film, it is too much to say that Ghatak did not know just what was happening with jukti Takko Ar Cappo. Despite the superficially loose structure the film develops along certain very precisely visualised lines. It is the unusual nature of the historical element at work that tends to disturb, and to lead us to minimise the complexity of its impact. The film in many ways represents the culmination of streams that have started in his earlier work. The lens, steadily widening with every film distorts almost like the fish-eye; the humour, amusing in Ajantrik (the bridegroom passenger), already black in Subarnareka (the foreman) leads to Jong, exaggerated lines with Jagannath and Panchanan Ustad, gnarled and twisted. Most startling, nature, so vibrant in every film, becomes gross like a calendar-painting as Neelkantha chases Durga round trees in grotesque caricature of filmy hero heroine sequences. The Mother Goddess figure in Bongobala is but a pale shadow of the tremendous figures of his earlier films, but she also represents an extreme theatricality that was only partially evident in the earlier films. In fact, all traces of the naturalist form are now consciously destroyed before the expressionist style. There is that feeling of sinking, of being increasingly engulfed by blackness as the forms that were used to liberate the viewer now turn against themselves. Ghatak once said that he had been accused of having been devoured by the Mother. Psychoanalytically, the reason why the alcoholic actually drinks directly from the bottle is because it approximates to breast-feeding. In the film we constanly see sudden, entitely unexplained shots such as the one of Neelkantha standing, camera over his left shoulder, staring directly into a mask of Durga he

lukti Takko Ar Cappo

holds in his hands; The mask disappears in the next shot, and there is no further reference to it at all. We experience a hunger, the urge to return to darkness, to the protection of the womb. Over these images are juxtaposed the ones of Bengal. The film begins and concludes with one static image, that of a shrunken, emaciated human figure in a hut, and the sound of vultures. The whole film is really one of images, of Calcutta, of the trade union leader ranting away to the accompaniment of a barking dog, the landgarb, the landlord who shoots Jagannath by mistake. The film seems to have been conceived in three parts, the first being the wanderings of the quartet, the second the Chhou dance, the third the encounter with the Naxalites. Each is distinctive, and the whole film naturally culminates in the final sequence. From the beginning we encounter violent disruptions of the realist narrative Durga's voice echoing, the desynchronising of sound to movement, the theatricality of Bongobala which is once incredibly underlined by the splicing in of the leader tape with the 10-9-8 numbers. The extreme wide-angle plays about constantly with sizes, suddenly

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stretching shapes that come close to the lens to awkward concave forms. From this kind of 'realist1 portrayal to the stylised Dance of Death, with the three black figures, and from such a Dance to the Chhou via Bongobala, the form grows freely. Bongobala fights to put on the Durga mask; and conceding her right to wear it, Panchanan says 'Dance, mother, dance. Only then can we grow". The stylised violence of the Dance of Death is precisely the image that comes, before one in the scene of the encounter with the Naxalites, and the arrival of the police. It is one of the most memorable in Chatak's cinema, and perhaps offers us a key to what he felt and thought in the last years of his life. The event and fallout of Naxalbari came as a strange attack on the peoples' conscience. While on one level the movement represented a radically new position within our political sphereit is the only significant reflection of the Maoist positionits true impact has been more than human one. Belween 1969-71, vast numbers of Calcutta's youth went out into the countryside and took up guns to fight with the peasantry. It was an amazing display of disenchantment with the dominant social system, the ruling class and the established left parties; a period when charismatic leadership was accompanied by a rousing determination to bring matters to a head. But even as the people watched, dumbfounded, it was followed by cold-blooded reprisals as the state forces systematically cracked down on the youth. Calcutta was searched house by house, and hundreds of youth with Naxalite connections and their friends, were flushed out and killed. The memory of the entirely unequal battle, and the subsequent massacre still haunts people who lived through it. One can only imagine the impactthishadon Ritwik Ghatak. But one can see in the film how Neelkantha, the enigmatic mask-figure, makes his only fervent attempt to get across to another person. It is almost laughable, were it not so savagely pathetic, to see the old man telling the youthful figure before him of dialectical and historical materialism while the boy is obviously more concerned with guarding his slepping comrades against a possible attack from the police. The next morning come the police, and the students are massacred. And a stray bullet hits Neelkantha. We see him crumbling to the ground, the bottle of liquor gradually pouring out of his hand on to the lens of the camera itself. His last words to Durga are, "Do you remem ber the story Madan Tati of Manik Bandopadhyay? About the weaver who ran an empty loom because he did not want to let down his comrades by going back to work but was too addicted to the habit of running it? I would like to be like him."

The encounter with the

Naxalites : jukti Takko Ar Cappo

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The mask : lukti Takko Ar Gappo There is one earlier scene in the film when the mask dissolves, just as it does here. This is when Bongobala tells Neelkantha abo'ut what she has seen and experienced in Bangladesh during the Pakistani genocide. The man is sitting as he always does, looking away, betraying nothing. But then, as she falls into his lap, sobbing, he intones, "Some day, at some new moon we shall realise that sleeping is not death...". He looks up, and even as he says this a transformation comes over his face, as the mask gives way to compassion. It is a use of the mask that we have perhaps only seen in Chaplin before. Chatak has in this film used himself, his bohemian reputation, as the mythic base from which to open out the content. He is himself the past the past that disturbs Shatrujit, that is sought to be destroyed by Durga and it is only through his own destruction even as the Naxalite youths are killed, that makes it possible for the others to face the future afresh. Here we see a transformation of myth, for it is now the cementing factor, the substance that unites individual struggles. Like the destruction of romanticism giving way to a more healthy romanticism, the strength to dream; destructive, constricting myth gives way to more constructive, political myth. The last shots of the film, Chatak's concluding moments in the cinema, show the giant rocks as the police lead Nachiketa, Bongobala and Durga back to the city. The very rocks seems full of life in their ruggedness, their sheer outlines. Like the fields of waving paddy, the beckoning river, the ravines, these rocks become the images of nature that emphasise life-affirmativeness, the relisation that nature is not, after all, indifferent.
**

At one point in Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan when Taran and the engineer walk together, Taran mentions her desire to go to Assam. As the engineerasks her, 'Why, do you like the hills?' We hear in the faint background the hill theme from Meghe Dhaka Tara. Thus Maya Darpan, in making a passing bow to the master, acknowledges the tradition and its source. For the rest the film is very different, coming from a different sensibility where lies the industrial belt and the clangour of machine production. Shahani, like his engineer, is a man from the city. Unlike the engineer, however, Shahani silently records what he sees, the changing landscape, the desert merging with industrial waste, a countryside that has so passively served its zamindar class now rising up against it. The gradual engulfing of the houses, the landlord class, and the one individual who feels the throttling, Taran, is expounded within the rhythmic base of the film. Through the film we see a gradual opening out of space as the grip round Taran tightens.

I he blue nude : Maya Darpan

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"I * i The use of space : Maya Darpan

is

One of the first experiences we are introduced to in the film is the tracking shot The camera slowly glides through the long corridors, showing the ceiling, the white pillars, in slow monumental manner. Used throughout to set the ryhthm, as an extension of the gestural rhythm of the characters, the track is lifted to significance that immediately recalls Chatak's use of the slow pan. The rhythm is gradually extended outward through the colours used and the space defined. The brick and the reddish-browns of the landscape are concretised into the red of Taran, the'lal bichona' that is introduced with the lullaby, and all of Taran's immediate environment Thus the counterpoints are set up as the oppressive milieu saturates into Taran's own space while Taran herself, the individual, possesses a human strength that counters the uniformity of the surrounding milieu. This human strength grows to powerful life-assertiveness later in the freedom of the blue nude. The violence of the release makes us aware of the extent of the entrapment It is preceded by just one other violent moment when Shahani cuts quite arbitrarily to a newsreel showing war and explodes into the yellow of the truck coming into the construction site. At both places, the violence is stated through the use of colour. Likewise there is the constant tension generated through the use of space. The five stills here are from a scene lasting barely a few minutes, during the narration of a poem on the track, when the individual is spaced out into the milieu. Her passivity forms the common underlying factor as we see the environment throbbing with activity. This same environment tufns passive later when, as Taran finally decides to go away, the purple of her sari comes as the violent resolution of the antagonistic forces that surround her. The release, introduced with the blue nude, is sustained overthe entire last section of the film. Chatak's momentary releases are replaced here with a stylisation of pure form that he never really achieved. The nude itself, a mother-figure possibly another reference to Chatak possesses the tremendous earthiness of the cult-sites. This is the birth of the release, the source of the eventual freedom that is once more found in fertility. Let us now see that the entire sequence of the release. The first indication comes through the mirror, the only object to break the monotony of the walls, a natural exit-point in the frame. Colour now

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moves in with the emphasis on the purple, which once more gradually gives way to the primary colours of fertility the red and the black as her sexual encounter with the engineer opens into the Chhou dance. This Chhou sequence itself sustains over nine movements with the camera slowly, magnificently panning downwards each time to raise the dancers up and out of the frame. All the vibrancy, the strength of the human gesture that the film has lacked is released now in its earthy power. The camera panning down itself is a movement that here possesses a rare grandeur. And then thefinal scene, where the shot pans over lush green hills, and a smooth expanse of water the symbols of fertility that are exactly drawn from Ghatak. But even there is entrapment, the shot taken from within a boat whose close frames intrude directly upon the freedom. Like Shahani, Kaul too has moved to concentrating primarily on the means of cinematic reproduction of reality and of leading that to greater significance. More than even Shahani, Kaul is disinterested in his dramatic content in Ashad Ka Ek Din he did not change a word from the original Mohan Rakesh stage play as he concentrates on what we may describe as the cinematicism of the gesture. This is the individual gesture of the character, its relation to the immediate objects that fit dialectically into it, and then the overall relationship of the object to the environment as defined by the frame of the shot In his initial films, Uksi Rot/ and Duvidha, Kaul attempted to lead this on to an emotional structure. But a form drawn entirely from' fiction demands a completion within itself, having life only for the duration of the narrative. After Duvidha, Kaul has interestingly moved to the documentary-fictional, one that appears to suit his structure much better. It has permitted him to relate to external forms more directly than through the emotional the fiction of Muktibodh (in Satah Se Utha Admi). or the dhrupad stvle in Dhrupad creating a much more vigorous dialectic as traditions clash, as forms draw from each other. The other flow is that of the pure documentary, as in Arrival where he confronts reality. It is here that the aesthetic significance of his structures is the most strongly revealed. Kaul extends both the pan and the purely static shot to tremendous effect The pan usually moves over objects with entirely different textures, over the sky, a wall, through darkness, often focussing on a solitary object in the far

corner of his frame. The static shot is often on an object none too interesting dramatically, but as he holds it for minutes on end, it suddenly transforms into something mysterious; the background is suddenly highlighted, the textures take on a strange life. In Arrival there is one shot of a young man eating at a pavement restaurant, and the camera holds him he transforms into a strange symbol with all kinds of significance. Kaul began, and still concentrates, on essences, on the internal sensuousness of even the most passive. This seems to have gradually deepened into a materialism that sees several layers of meaning in the object The object in its individuality gives way to its representation of all objects and the labour that has gone into their making. It's significance then goes even beyond, as an almost archetypal form is seen in it Myth and reality, prominent Chatak streams, move to a distinctly more significant relationship in Ketan Mehta's Bhavni Bhavai. In that film, Mehta moves from myth to history, in itself a feat, but more so becauseTie does it without contradicting each with the other. They merge together into a past that is evoked through an unusual ensemble of memory, myth and folkore. Starting from the tale, the film moves to a culmination into the familiar present, a stylistic journey from the folk form to the cinematic documentary. If we notice a Chatak tradition in the work of these filmmakers, it is mainly in their search for new cinematic signification. Despite Chatak's tremendous rootedness to his immediate milieu, there has been no important Bengali filmmaker who consciously seems to have drawn from his work or accepted his influence. The reason, is perhaps because whatever his own concerns, their importance is in the way he opens them out, makes them universal. This is what has permitted filmmakers from entirely different backgrounds and different concerns, but attempting a similar universalisation, to take them forward and into the definition of a tradition. It is unfortunate that it has been precisely these filmmakers who have been finding it the most difficult to keep working, who have suffered the worst attacks for their supposed 'elitism'. What is unsettling is the extent to which their achievements have been used by a whole new'middle-ground' of filmmakers who would claim the 'art label while also hungering for the success of the commercial circuit

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In a sense this development is to be expected, for cinema today is too important a tool in the hands of our ruling sections for them to permit any significant change in the modes of its communication. These sections know well enough where the real threat to their stability comes from. In days to come the attacks upon an independence of viewpoint will almost definitely get increasingly intensified. As we then seek to withstand them, the.need will also be to understand better yet the conflict of antagonistic traditions. The only way of survival would then be in the refusal to limit a tradition to the work of one man, in a constant unrelenting struggle to widen it. It will only be the ability of the tradition to withstand the onslaught that will then determine its strength and the contribution to it of the individual Ritwik Ghatak.

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Notes

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Jung, C. G. Symbols of Transformation, pg. 233. Shahani, Kumar Violence and Responsibility Eisenstein, SergeiFilm. Form, pg. 165 Jung, C.G.Memories, Dreams, Reflections pg. 19 Tagore, RabindranathReminiscences pg. 208 From Ritwik Ghatak, ed. Shampa Bannerjee From Ritwik Ghatak, ed. Shampa Bannerjee Marx, KarlCrundrisse (Introduction) Marx, KarlOn Literature and Art pg. 84 Marx, Karl-Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Collected Works Vol III, pg.273 Marx, Karl Collected Works, Vol III, pg. 276 Marx, Karl Capital Vol I pg. 90-91 Marx, Karl-Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Collected Works Vol III, pg17 34. Marx, KarlCollected Works Vol III, pg. 39

1. 2. 3.

Nehru, Jawaharlal Address to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI),. 1955. V. I. Lenin Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism Chandra, Bipan Historians of Modern India and Communalism. It must be mentioned here that Chandra's criticism of the myths that dominatd the nationalist movement have been given rather more weight here than Chandra himself, here and elsewhere, is prepared to give.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Marx, KarlCollected Works Vol III, pg. 39 Marx, KarlCrundrisse (Introduction) Kapur, Geeta-Partisan Views About the Human Figure (Catalogue of Place for

4. 5. 6.

Edwardes, Michael Last Years of British India, a book that may be referred to for a thoroughly conservative view of the freedom struggle. Hauser, Arnold Social History of Art, Vol. Ill, pg. 164 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K Am I My Brother's Keeper?

People) Ray, SatyajiOur Films, Their Films Shahani, KumarFilm World, Jan 1980

7. Coomaraswamy, A. K. Dance of Shiva 8. Coomaraswamy A. K. Dance erf Shiva 9. Kapur, Geeta On The Creation of the Artist Concerning Coomaraswamy's Rejection of the Modern 10. Fischer, Ernst On the Problem of Realism 11. The concept is borrowed from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis 12. Pierre Macabru, reproduced in Satyajit Ray, ed. Chidananda Das Gupta, Film India. 13. Indian Film, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, pg. 143-144 14. The 1st Indian International Film Festival was held in Calcutta in 1952, when Italian neorealist cinema was shown in India for the first time. It directly influenced a whole wave of realist films in India, like Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin. 15. Brecht, Bertolt Brecht on Theatre, pg 107 16. Jung, C.G. Symbols of Transformation 17. Eisenstein, Sergei The Music of the Landscape, Cahiers Du Cinema 18. Sha'hani, Kumar For Ritwik Ghatak 19. Jung, C. G. Symbols of Transformation, pg. 60. 20. Interestingly, Ghatak had taken Nargis, the actress so,identified by her role in Mother India, to act in his Durbargati Padma as the archetypal woman raped in Bangladesh.

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Filmography

MEGHE DHAKA TARA (1960) Production: Chitrakaipa Story: Shaktipada Rajguru Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dinen Gupta Music: Jyotirindra Moitra Playback: Debabrata Biswas, A. Kanan, Hemangu Biswas Editing: Ramesh Joshi Cast: Supriya Chowdhury, Anil Chatterjee, Gita Ghatak, Bijon Bhattacharya, Gyanesh Mukherjee NAGARIK (T952-53) Production: Film Guild Story, screenplay & direction: Ghatak Editing: Ramesh Joshi ORAON (Documentary, 1955) A|ANTRIK(1958) Production: L & B. Films Internatioal Production: L& B Films International Story: Subodh Ghosh Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dinen Gupta Music: AM Akbar Khan Editing: Ramesh Joshi Cast: Kali Banerjee, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Anil Chatterjee
BARI THERE PALIYE (1959)

FEAR (1964-65) Production: Jagat Murari (Director, Film & Television Institute, Pune) Story, screenplay, music & direction: Ritwik Ghatak RENDEZVOUS (1965) (Diploma film made under Ritwik Ghatak's supervision) Production: Film & Television Institute, Pune Direction: Rajendra Nath Shukla Cinematography: Amarjeet, Music: Ramkadam Editing: Vikram Rajput Cast: Sudharani Sharma, S. Dinkar, Govardhan Lai

November 4, 1925: Borrvat Dacca. 1948: B. A. from Krishnanath College, Berhampur. Began his career in films as assistant director underManoj Bhattacharyafor his Tathapi. Joined the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association (I. P. T. A.) as playwright, director& acton produced Bhanga Bandar, Daleel, Visharjan etc. Translated Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. 1950: Joined Government service as film director. Novels: Ayananta, Aakas'n Ganger, Path Beye. Wrote widely on film in several periodicals. Edited two journals Abhidhara and Abhinay-Darpan. Produced and directed radio plays. Joined Filmistan, Bombay, as story writer and screen-play writer. 1956: Became a full-time film director until his death on February 6, 1976. Published Chalachitra: Manush Evam Ar Kichhua collection of his articles on film. BEOENI (1951> Production: Sunil Roy Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Chatak (based on a story by Tarashankar Bandopadhaya). Cinematography: Sachin Dasgupta Cast: Kali Banerjee, Ketaki Devi, Prabha Devi The film was initially shot under Nirmal De's supervision. Ritwik Chatak was asked to complete it. He rewrote the screenplay and did 20 days outdoor shooting. Due to a technical flaw the film was not exposed.

Ritwik

Production: L& B Films International Story: Shivram Chakravarty Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dinen Gupta Music: Salil Chowdhury Editing: Ramesh Joshi
KAUTO AUJANA RE (1959)

Production: Mihir Saha Story: Shankar Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dilipranjan Mukherjee Cast: Chhavi Biswas, Kali Banerjee (The film was abandoned aftier all but the last scene was shot).

KOMAL GANDHAR (1961) Production: Chitrakaipa Story, screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dilipranjan Mukherjee Music: jyotirindra Moitra SCIENTISTS OF T O M O R R O W (1967) Playback singers: Debabrata Biswas, Production: Films Division Hemangu Biswas Story,screenplay, musics direction: Ritwik Editing: Ramesh joshi Ghatak Cast: Supriya Chowdhury, Avinas'h Baner- Cinematography: Amarjeet jee, Anil Chatterjee, Bijon Bhattacharya Editing: Rames-h Joshi Commentary: Ritwik Ghatak SUBARNAREKHA (1952; Released in RAUNGER GHULAM (1968) 1965) Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Production: J.J. Films Corporation Cinematography: Mahendra Story: Radheyshyam Cast: Anil Chatterjee, Sita Devi, Jahar Roy, Screenplay& direction: Ritwik Ghatak Shankar Cinematography: Dilipranjan Mukherjee (The film was abandoned after a few Music: Bahadur Khan outdoor sessions) Playback: Arati Mukherjee Editing: Ramesh Joshi CHHAO DANCE OF PURULIA (documenCast: Madhavi Mukherjee, Cast: Madhavi Mukherjee, Satindra Bhat- tary,! 970) Production: Sumanta Films tacharya, Abhi Bhattacharya Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak USTAD ALLAUDDIN KHAN (Documen- Cinematography: Dhruvajyoti Basu, Dipak Basu & Dipak Das tary 1963) Music: Bahadur Khan Editing: Ramesh Joshi BAGALAR BANGADARSHAN (1964-65) Commentary: Ritwik Ghatak Production: Raman Maheshwari Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak AMAAR LENIN (1970) Cinematography: Dilipranjan Mukherjee Production: Sumanta Films Music: Hridaya Ranjan Kushari Cast: Sunil, Indrani Mukherjee, Padma Screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Dhruvajyoti Basu & Devi (The film was abandoned after one week's Shakti Banerjee Music: Jyotirindra Moitra & Binoy Roy shooting)

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Editing: Ramesh loshi (So far the film has not been publicly released in India. It has, however, been screened in the USSR) YEH KYUN? (1970) Production, story, screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Mahendra Music: Rarnesh Moitra Cast: Atanu Roy, Arun Kumar (The film has not yet been released) DURBARGATI PADMA (1971) (Short film, partly (oloured) Production: Trio Films Story, screenplay & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Casl: Biswajit, Nargis TITASH EKTI NADIR NAAM (197)) Production: Pran KathaChitra(Bangaladesh) Story: Advaita Malla Rarman Screenplay*, direction: Ritwik Ghatak

Cinematography: Baby Islam Music: Bahadur Khan and Ahidul Haq Editing: Basheer Hussain Cast: Rosy, Sufia, Kabari Chowdhury JUKTI, TAKKO, AR GAPPO (1974) Production: Rita Chitra Story, screenplay, music & direction: Ritwik Ghatak Cinematography: Baby Islam Playback singers: Debabrata Biswas, Arati Mukherjee Editing: Ramesh Joshi Cast: Ritwik Ghatak, Tripti Mitra, Saonli Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya, Utpal Dutt RAM KINKAR (1975) ( I t mm. Documentary, colour) Production, screenplay& direction: Ritwik Ghatak. Cinematography: Mahendra (Ritwik Ghatak died before the film could be completed)

Courtesy: West Bengal Bureau, New Delhi

Information

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