Shiv Kotecha on the Poetic Refugee Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak

Poetry and Partition: The Films of Ritwik Ghatak is running at Lincoln Center this week; and it's timely, says Shiv Kotecha in a reflection on Ghatak's work for Frieze. "Set in 1950s Calcutta (now Kolkata), the old man in Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar," for instance, "refuses to accept the narrative of statelessness and the threat of disappearance." More:

Born in 1925 in Dhaka, East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Ghatak and his family were among the millions forced to flee the state either because of the catastrophic 1943 famine – created and exacerbated by the wartime colonial policies of the British Raj – or because of Partition, which left millions of Bangadeshi and Pakistani either dead or displaced. Ghatak left for Calcutta, where he was an active member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association – a communist collective that was (briefly) the cultural focal point of postwar Bengal – and for which he directed and acted in plays. Unlike Satyajit Ray, whose (undeniably beautiful) early narratives are immaculate constructions centred around the experience of childhood, and the backdrop of a home, Ghatak’s works reflect the fraught tumults of a nation at odds with itself.

In his 1963 essay, ‘Film and I’, he makes a telling claim: ‘Truly serious and considerate artists bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it.’ This rising ‘pressure’ is the very texture of a Ghatak film; close-ups splice visages unevenly, jump cuts stutter back-and-forth and diegetic and non-diegetic sounds overlap and blur, making the loneliest scene of recollection feel impinged and affected by its dissonant surroundings...