If your
father happened to be Ritwick
Ghatak, you as a son would, perhaps, remember
him in a flashback of a series of fade-ins and
fade-outs and close-up shots that never made their
way to the editing table.
Satyajit
Ray, on the other hand, remains well documented
in the numerous books written on him, articles
and photographs and in the various rough cuts,
ideas and his own published materials. Characters
like Feluda and a Professor Shonku continue to
inspire generations in Bengal and maybe outside
it, just as his son, Sandip, embarks on his third
feature film based on this charming sleuth.
How different the two fathers are! How different
they are as human beings and most of all, how
very, very different they are as filmmakers. Ghatak,
who along with Ray, shaped a certain kind of Bengali
cinema, that is bound by the same milieu, language
and political thought, yet remained so different
in their respective approach towards filmmaking
and style. Intuitive and instinctive are Ghatak’s
works; his oeuvre is comparable to a beautiful
lady in a crumpled cotton sari. Ray’s films
are ever so neat; the pleats of the lady’s
sari never out of their place.
How different were they as fathers? If Sandip
Ray, a filmmaker in his own right today, remembers
a very dedicated man, who worked with a rare precision
in whatever in did, meticulously planning the
out-of-city schedules in keeping with his son’s
school vacation, Ritaban remembers a father who
would disappear into Olypub, the famous watering
hole on Park Street, only to emerge from it well
past the little boy’s bed time.
 Ritaban,
who dabbles in documentaries, remembers the tortured
soul of his father who loved the family in ways
that perhaps baffles neat definitions. The maverick
soul that Ghatak was, at times, drew his family
around him. But these times were rare. He remembers
more of the pain of a filmmaker who was perhaps
his worst enemy. For filmmaking itself in an art
that involves the ublime with the ridiculous and
for those ideal filmmakers who look only for the
sublime, the bane of their very existence, are
perhaps totally out of synch with the ludicrous
reality.
Ritaban Ghatak may have had a difficult childhood.
Yet there is no bitterness; he talks fondly of
the numerous unfinished and the incomplete scripts
left behind by his father, whose scribbling and
jottings were never published. Or made available
only to the avant-garde. The very many ideas that
he drew from life but never were concretized on
celluloid. They remain unsung just as the man
was, when he lived. A consummate artist, whose
works, as quoted by Ray himself, never reflected
an iota of this madness. If anyone suffered Ghatak’s
demons, it was the man himself and his close family.
Ghatak made only eight films during his lifetime
but he wrote the scripts of many, including the
one that was directed by Bimal
Roy. Madhumati
(1958) was as mainstream a Hindi film could
be. He perhaps would have stayed back to write
more, if given a chance. There was a script on
the street urchins of Bombay, which he had hoped
Hiten Choudhury would produce but did not. Would
that be the original Saalam Bombay (1988),
the film, which shot Mira Nira to recognition?
Who knows, who cares with the passage of time;
these are but nuggets of memory that remain trapped
within a son’s mind. But imagine if we had
more films of Ghatak. Even another one!
 Compare
this to the clinical output of Ray. A film per
year. Very good cinema in all its imageries. Unparalleled,
true but in the typical Ray mould. In a way, Ray’s
drew his inspiration of filmmaking from a western
perspective. Just as his music was, heavily influenced
by the sombre orchestral overtones. The planning
of a film was made to the last minutest detail.
Ray was a self-confessed and an unabashed Hollywood
fan. Ghatak’s was the very opposite. Earthy,
raw and rooted to the soil as it were. A man going
around the villages, looking for that something
and stories in trying to make a sense of this
vast country and its people. Bedeni or gypsy woman
was his first script. No chamber drama for him.
In the same way perhaps, he tried to search inside
men’s souls, when they were drunk in bars
and with their bhadralok mask off.
Ray’s life was one that was very well lead,
even if filmmaking takes helluva out of everybody.
It is never a picnic that it is often described
as, sons or no. Ray set examples. He set standards.
A versatile person, he would have done more films
if he had not died of a bad heart. He did cover
the entire portfolio of a Bengali existence; some
obvious examples would be the pristine rural Bengal
(Pather
Panchali (1955))
to a famished Asani Sanket; urban realities
in Mahanagar
(1963) and Seemabaddha
(1971).
.
There is no one single thing you can pinpoint
about Ghatak, except that raw energy he exuded
in his works. The chaos he functioned in and surrounded
himself with; the indiscipline his body paid with.
The uncertainties he wrapped his little boy in.
The little boy, his son, remembers only too well.
It is the same raw emotion that exudes from every
frame of his films. He too was versatile in his
own way. He toyed with the idea of writing an
alternate history of India and about the various
art forms (theatre mostly) hidden in the nooks
and crevices of our villages.
If there are many images out of Ray’s films
etched on our minds, the most enduring is the
one out of Ghatak’s Meghe
Dhaka Tara (1960), the last scene in fact.
"Dada, I too want to live..."
cries Supriya
Devi to Anil Chatterjee, when she is dying
of tuberculosis and just when the fortune of a
dispossessed family has turned for the better.
Don’t we all? A method in madness or a
madness in method. We all choose our own terms
in living our lives and cinema primarily reflects
this truth. .
Manjira Majumdar is a consulting editor
and writer based in Kolkata.
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