Her Mother's Son
Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak

Moinak Biswas

1. Ritwik Ghatak, 'Ekamatra Satyajit Ray' in Chitrabhash 18:1-2, 1984, p 108.

2. Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Aparajito, 1931.

3. A close look at the Apu Trilogy as a whole, however, would reveal that Ray follows the novelist's cue more closely than Ghatak's comment would suggest. He introduces naturalist dispersal into the realist narrative and works with an incomplete separation between the individual and the natural horizon.

4. Foreword to Ritwik Ghatak's Cinema and I, 1987, reprinted in Ritwik Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) p. ix.

5. Marie Seton was one of the first critics to use this term in her essay 'New Wave in Bengali Films' (1960), cited in Rajat Ray, 'Paschatya Samalochoker Dristite Ritwik Ghataker Chhabi' in Ritwik O Tar Chhabi, Vol. 2, ed. Rajat Ray (Calcutta: Annapurna Pustak Mandir) pp 112-116.

6. An example of this would be Amiya Kumar Bagchi's 'Ritwik Ghatak', Frontier, July 7, 1984, where he tried to read Ghatak's work in conjunction with the 'conservative' tradition of 19th century Bengal, a tradition that, in the work of the poet Iswarchandra Gupta or dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra, was more critical of the colonial rule than its liberal counterpart. The general leftist reaction to the 'traditional' aspect of Ghatak's cinema was negative, contributing to his isolation from the most likely of his patrons in the radical period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For typical examples of such reaction see the essays by Iraban Basu Roy and Prabrit Das Mahapatra in Ritwik Ghatak O Tar Chhabi, Vol 2. The Assamese Marxist critic, Hiren Gohain, raised similar objections to Bagchi's essay cited above in Frontier.

The Citizen's Journey and the Eternal Return

Commenting on Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), Ritwik Ghatak wrote that the film's ending ‘suffers from a major misconception’. (1) Ray's film ends with Apu walking away from the horizon, towards the camera, with Kajol on his shoulders, they are set on the path to the future. However, the novel (2) ends with Apu returning to his ancestral village with his son, Kajol. As the young boy stands before the ruins of their abandoned home the place itself and its lost inhabitants – dead family members, local gods, characters from the local lore and from The Mahabharata – begin to speak to him. They announce the return of Apu in the incarnation of the boy. The return to the bosom of the ancestral village at the end of Bibhuitbhushan's novel is poignant in its very refusal to follow the archetypal novelistic journey from the country to the city. It is a return of the village itself as a lost consciousness. Ray does away with this episode, and seems to offer an affirmative image of the trajectory of the citizen. (3) Ghatak's comment, made towards the end of his career, reveals more about his own art than about anything else. It tells us about his approach to questions of selfhood and narrative. Ghatak expressed deep admiration for the first two films of the trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956), but even with Pather Panchali, Apu's movement away from the village at the end bothered him, he found it lacking in depth, that ‘the wanderer's generous melody’ was absent in that ending.

The mythical power of return will fascinate Ghatak; he was not satisfied with a form that enacts the historical flow but sought to turn history itself into an object of investigation. That one important task seemed to be to give expression to the sense of violation brought on by the historical transportation of his people into the scene of the contemporary nation. He could not do this by positing a wholesome tradition and past, over and against modernity, a road taken by much of popular cinema since the 1970s, but he had to remain strangely solitary in his choices. Ray was to write of Ghatak, ‘One doesn't notice any influence of other schools of filmmaking on his work. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all. The occasional echo of classical Soviet school is there, but this does not prevent him from being in a class by himself’. (4) It was as much a matter of choice as of training, his cinema was 'intellectual' (5) in the sense that there was a conscious attempt to make cinema itself a tool in the search for what, rephrasing Bertolt Brecht's words, one can call a 'fighting conception of the modern'. Ghatak's solitude should be a challenge to the critic, not least because it cautions us against using his example as one of questioning modern modes from the side of tradition as is sometimes done. (6) Let us remember that his use of popular forms of narrative and performance did not win him any popular audience in his time.

The City of Oblivion

At the end of their night-long revelry in Subarnarekha (1962), the two renegades, Iswar and Haraprasad, take a taxi ride down the streets of Calcutta. Earlier, in the pub, verses from the Upanishad were chanted against the theme music of La Dolce Vita. The great spiritual delirium of the city continues to bring cultural quotes into a spectacular collage as the two drunken friends are swallowed up by the night. On the haze of streetlights passing across the screen we hear their voices:

‘Haven't seen the Atom Bomb’
‘Haven't. Haven't they?’
‘Never. Haven't seen the War, haven't seen the Famine, haven't seen the riots, haven't seen the Partition... Useless – that old hymn to the glory of the Sun ...’

Iswar will turn up at his sister's quarter as her first customer soon after this. She will slash her own throat with a kitchen knife. Ghatak names his project with fearsome accent here: remembering not to forget.

7. See, for example 'Interview with Ghatak' in Ghatak: Arguments/ Stories, ed. Ashish Rajadhyakasha and Amrit Gangar (Bombay: Screen Unit) 1987, pp 88-89.

8. The Indian People's Theatre Association. Launched in 1943, it led a highly creative movement of politically engaged art and literature, bringing into its fold the foremost artists of the time. Ghatak and Mrinal Sen are among the direct products of the movement.

9. See his lyrical reminiscences in 'Chhabi Kora' in Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p35.

12. ‘Jagaddal’ means the immoveable.

13. Which is to say that it functions like what Lacan called the gaze, a look that belongs to no one.

The First Films

With the exception of Ajantrik (1958), the films from the 1950s and ‘60s show a compulsive engagement with the brother-sister relationship. The absence of the couple, however, connects Ajantrik also to the same preoccupation. Here the two-term, pre-social bond is between the hero Bimal and his jalopy, Jagaddal. (12) Bimal is an eccentric, a loner; the only conversation he can have is with the car and the young garage boy, Sultan. His fellow taxi-drivers make fun of him, 'Is the car a woman?' they ask. Perhaps it is, but what kind of woman? In a rare moment of eloquence, Bimal tells Sultan that in these days of hardship, the old car gets him his day's meal; it came into his life, he says, the year his mother passed away. Let us recall the sequences with the runaway bride. The moment she appears Bimal is seized by a strange and almost comic disturbance, which is matched by the reactions of the car (its gets murderously jealous, even tries to run over the woman). After the woman, cheated and abandoned by the man she had eloped with, leaves in the train, this play of identification – the humanisation of the car, the humanism of the story – disintegrates before our eyes. Bimal tries to catch her in the next station by taking a shortcut through the hills. The car breaks down on the way, gets reduced to the 'thing' as it were, it refuses to be human any more. Nature stands grandly aloof, watching. The very look of the camera breaks free of diegetic sources and begins to flow in from nowhere. (13)

As the hero steps into the domain of social sexuality, as the possibility of romantic couple formation is suggested, it is the realist order of the narrative that falls into crisis. Why should transition from the pre-social to the social create a crisis for the realist logic? The answer might tell us about Ghatak's distance from not only familiar forms but also from the agreed upon equations between forms and feelings. When we move into the other kinship bond that forecloses couple formation – the brother-sister bond rather than the bond with the mother – the whole question becomes much more complex, generates formidable challenges. The conflict between maternality and conjugality is simpler – after all Indian melodrama has been negotiating a resolution of that conflict for decades – but none of us were prepared for the those brothers and sisters of Ghatak to appear as exemplars of the pure couple.

Towards the end of Nagarik (1953), the unemployed hero Ramu receives the promise from his beloved Uma that she will join him in the slum his family is moving into. As she makes the promise, we see a close-up of the starving Uma: her face awash with soft light, strong backlight throwing a rim of silver dust on her hair. It reminds us of the close-up of Nita in The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) at the end of the duet she sings with her brother. Uma's expression of solidarity inspires Ramu to urge their tenant, Sagar, to accept his sister Sita as his partner, to be a fellow traveller in their impending journey into the night. But the Ramu-Uma relationship is dealt with briefly, almost with reluctance in Nagarik, the real emotional bonding exists between Ramu and his sister Sita. Sita, wasting away at home as the unmarriageable daughter, can laugh and become playful only in the company of her elder brother, and Ramu finds in her the friend who knows him more than anyone else, believes in him despite his repeated failure to get a job. The parents appear at times to have become calloused by the daily privations, but tenderness is preserved in the domain of interaction between the two siblings. Theatrical use of the body at climactic points, which evolves into significant sculptural and dance-like postures in the three films of the ‘60s, appears in its cruder form in the film. But significantly, these gestures appear with the same intensity in the scenes between Ramu and his sister as in those between Ramu and Uma. They come at points of emotional saturation between Ramu and Sita, when the pain of one seems to pierce the other. Names are almost never without allegorical import in Ghatak's films; they are called Ram and Sita after the divine couple from the Ramayana.

The tale of a village boy's adventure in Runaway (Bari Theke Paliye, 1959) places the mother as the princess, she is the woman for whom the boy seeks the treasure in the city. However, the sister – one who is younger in age (the elder sister often figures as an extension of the mother in Indian families) – appears as part of a proto-romance in the story. The runaway Kanchan meets the little Mini in the city, is very attracted to her, and dreams of taking her home to his mother. Mini's ailing mother treats Kanchan as a son, he finds a second home in Mini's house. The two children look like early incarnations of lovers, foreshadowing the young Abhiram and Sita in Subarnarekha. That film will also show that in a way it is consistent with the 'obsession' with the mother archetype in Ghatak's films that the brother and sister should form the primary basis of love.

Against the Mandate of Separation: The three films of the '60s

The overvaluation of this kinship bond in the films has gone unnoticed but it is insistent. Nita in The Cloud-Capped Star fails in her relationship with Sanat, but then the relationship is something in which she hardly participates with any enthusiasm, and it does not seem to occupy her much once Sanat's betrayal is confirmed. On the other hand, she and her elder brother Shankar create an island of happiness and belonging in the turbulent waters of the refugee home. It is the secret sharing of a language that their relationship thrives on. They exchange poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, indulge in childish play, together they devise means to tackle the daily humiliation of the artist and the dreamer.

14. Tagore song.

E-Flat is the only film in Ghatak's oeuvre where romantic love is central. The extended metaphor is that of marriage, the love triangle serves as an allegorical core elaborated into relationships between individuals, groups and places of dwelling. Ghatak captures his own autobiography as a radical theatre activist and playwright, weaves the story of his own marriage into the plot, talks about the Partition of 1947 directly for the first time, as something witnessed by his protagonists. This audacity was greeted with silence and slander. The film was booed out of the theatres, Ghatak's old colleagues turned against it. More than the obsession with Partition, at this point it was the articulation of personal experiences that alienated his audience. But that is the task that the film sets itself. A traditional marriage song sung by women works as the leitmotif; marriage and love become depersonalised through ritual enactment. In the tussle between the two rival theatre groups Anasuya, the heroine, works as a mediator; but her crossing over to Bhrigu's group is also an anthropological act of exchange between two sides, here put into effect by woman herself. The love story, thus refracted, connects with the theme of re-unification of the divided Bengal. Conjugality calls for separation from the original family and community; it is quite possible to think that E-Flat uses the motif of marriage, paradoxically, to suggest an overcoming of the imperative of separation. Not simply the joining of two hearts, here the theme of marriage suggests the healing of the sore of separation. To mourn the separation a new political drama is envisaged: Bhrigu (and Ghatak himself) goes back to Kalidasa's Abhijnan Shakuntalam to fashion the epic form he is searching for. The scenes from the play that we see centre around the heroine Shakuntala's departure for her husband's kingdom.

At the end of the film Anasuya and Bhrigu stand close to the railway tracks joining hands in a gesture reminiscent of the wedding ritual. The motif of the railway track is introduced in a scene early in the film, through an inspired sequence of orchestrated spaces, actions and songs. During an outing, Bhrigu and Anasuya stand at the very end of the tracks in that scene; they look beyond the river Padma and reminisce about their lost homes on the other side. From what they say they seem to share the same family, the same home and childhood. On the second outing, in the Kurseong hills, Anasuya tells Jaya, her younger teammate, about her activist mother who was killed in the communal riots. Her mother had a rare fire in her eyes, she says, and she can see that light in Bhrigu's eyes. Later, on their third excursion in Bolpur, she will hand over her most precious possession, her mother's diary, to Bhrigu, and tell him, ‘You are my mother's son, I knew it the moment I saw you.’

15. ‘We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers’, 'Violence and Responsibility' in Ghatak: Arguments/Stories, p 62. See also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak, A Return to the Epic, pp 104-110.

16. In by far the best commentary available on the film Ghatak tries to explain the 'melodramatic lapse' into coincidences in the film by drawing attention to the role played by coincidence in his 'epic' form. The central event, the brother turning up as the sister's client, being a coincidence, everything else could be. But what kind of coincidence is it? ‘ (one) has to understand that whichever woman the brother visited would have been his sister’, 'Subarnarekha Prasange' (1966), Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p 41.

As the director keeps playing with his favourite low-angle shots the impending destruction comes to be signalled through the image. Iswar draws Sita close to him, asks her how she could exactly be like the mother she has never seen. Sita leans forward, caresses his forehead and whispers in his ear that she is his mother. We see the two of them in an extreme low-angle shot that takes in part of the fan whirling on the ceiling. The strain on the limits of the frame begins to point to the breaching of the borders of named relations. Later, after Sita's desertion, the frame will be repeated: Iswar would try to hang himself from the hook where the fan was hanging in the earlier scene.

Sita marries the low-born Abhiram. His mother, we are briefly told, is called Kaushalya after the hero's mother in Ramayana. The untouchable refugee Ram and Sita grow up like siblings. When they run into the abandoned airstrip their playful figures momentarily but strongly recall Apu and Durga running into the fields in Pather Panchali. They do not seem to have any other playmates save each other in this remote and profoundly quiet country. As soon as the grown-up Abhiram comes back from the town, the film offers us their love as a simple fact, as if nothing else could have been the case. If the film strives to reveal the self-destructive drives of a threatened community then it does so in keeping with the general value that Ghatak places on such bonding in his films, its nurturing potential is also underlined. Sita, Abhiram and Iswar spend extended days of childhood at an idyllic remove from the turbulent city. Sita loses her brothers when the man-woman relationship is invoked in the space of the city which embodies the historical present.

Tales and History

Ghatak's own essays are among the best commentaries available on the films, but he shares the silence of his commentators on this particular theme. He did feel the need to invoke psychoanalytic categories to explain some of his persistent motifs, but it was Jungian theory that engaged his attention. He needed conceptual tools that would compensate for the lack of attention to questions of subjectivity and tradition in contemporary Marxist thinking, and Jung helped him think of these questions in relation to the collective experience. Given the intellectual atmosphere he belonged to, Freud would have meant too much of a retreat into the individual. One would, however, like to know how Ghatak, with his keen anthropological interests, would have responded to the critical possibilities of rethinking the family complexes beyond individual destinies or universalist claims, as insights into the social formation of subjects, as allegories of passage into the realm of social exchange.

17. Ramanujan, 'The Indian Oedipus' in Oedipus, A Folklore Casebook, ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) pp 238-261.

18. Sophocles's play shows how from Jocasta's perspective the tale is pre- or non-Oedipal, she knows there is hardly any man who has not desired his mother.

One could imagine Sita remembering such a song before her death.

The Indian tales Ramanujan lists are surprisingly close to the Greek myth, but the very fact that most of them are mothers' stories, told by the woman, disturbs the whole Freudian theme of growth through the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The tale becomes pre-Oedipal once ordered from this perspective, in the sense that it tells of resistance to the insertion of the third term into the two-term bond that brings on the moment of the complex. (18) How to find stories that would resonate with narratives already embedded in a social life? One could try to make sense of the tragic overvaluation of blood ties with such artistic problems in mind. As a storyteller Ghatak invests the relation with his own value and meaning, which gains resonance through the existing anthropological possibilities of ordering that relation.

22. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution, Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis ( London: Virago, 1984) pp 287-294.

Ghatak never made the political films a sworn Marxist like him would be expected to make. His politics becomes emotionally so rich because, alongside the bold picturing of everyday struggles, he repeatedly captures the necessary but tragic denial by individuals to tread into the full light of the day. Nita, Anasuya or Sita are fully engaged individuals in relation to labour, daily hardships and challenges of survival, but they also seem to be unspeakably tender, almost luminous beings. The choric grocer in The Cloud-Capped Star says of Nita, ‘The tender girl ... how can she bear such hardship?’ Partly unprepared to deal with the cruelty of the world, they cling to the one who is part of their own selves. The fullness of being is gathered into this fold, the implacable sense of pain in Ghatak's cinema seems to stem from this hidden enclosure.

Such passion is not simply endorsed or negated (in fact Nita, Sita and Iswar stand accused to some extent in the films), but is presented as material for the tragic form that neither melodrama nor realism of the day was adequate to. The formal deviations from realism that caused such misgivings about Ghatak's cinema function not in opposition to the modern mode, which the filmmaker embraced, but as a critique from inside it, pointing to the cost at which such modes are assimilated into our lives.