Ritwik Ghatak centenary | The many afterlives of the Bengali auteur in Bollywood

The movie lover’s accepted presumption is ‘what if’. What if Ritwik Ghatak’s Nagarik, completed successful 1952 but unreleased till his death, was released earlier Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955? Would the posthumous outsize bequest that arrived successful the decades since helium has gone beryllium his successful his lifetime?

But this is simply a ‘what is’ statement, not a ‘what if’ piece. What is uncontestably existent is that Ghatak’s bequest successful mainstream Hindi movie is much palpable, and arguably much celebrated, than the bequest of Ray and Mrinal Sen, his contemporaries successful the alleged beatified trinity. Ray gets much articulator work from mainstream Hindi filmmakers, and Sen gets much nods successful the enactment — for instance, successful the usage of the communicative voiceover, successful fashionable Hindi film’s emotion for self-referencing arsenic we spot successful Yash Raj and Dharma films. But that is different essay.

There are 2 reasons wherefore Ghatak has a much nonstop footprint successful fashionable Hindi film. One is his much-talked astir usage of melodrama arsenic a form. The different is his stint successful the Film and Television Institute of India arsenic a teacher. By accounts disposable online, this was lone implicit the play 1965-1966, but intelligibly it was a potent mates of years fixed the fig of acknowledgements helium received from figures specified arsenic Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Payal Kapadia. (Kapadia’s documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing features a mural of Ghatak astatine the FTII campus.)

Melodrama reimagined

First, melodrama. Mainstream Hindi movie is considered melodramatic, whereas arthouse film, peculiarly Indian arthouse shaped by post-war Italian neorealism and the French caller wave, prefers realism. This, obviously, is simply a immense generalisation — Ghatak himself is arthouse yet melodramatic — but for now, fto it stand. Given this kinship of melodrama, the man’s beingness is people palpable successful mainstream Hindi film, including those of today.

How bash I recognize Ghatak’s usage of melodrama? The modular explanation of melodrama is simply a crippled wherever overmuch happens, including a reliance connected coincidences, and sentiments are overheated, the sum of it veering towards exaggeration. Realism tends towards simpler, slices-of-everyday beingness plots. In Ghatak’s best-known work Meghe Dhaka Tara, it is not capable that the protagonist Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) has to springiness up her studies, and loses her suitor to her sister to enactment her Partition exile family, but she indispensable besides declaration a deadly signifier of tuberculosis that consumes her, literally.

In Subarnarekha, it is not capable that the heroine Seeta (Madhabi Mukherjee) is estranged from her beloved member Ishwar, loses her hubby to a tragic accident, and is forced to instrumentality up enactment enactment to enactment herself, but besides that her precise archetypal lawsuit is the aforesaid estranged older member (by coincidence). This benignant of heated crippled improvement is overmuch person to Bollywood.

Ghatak pioneered 1 of Bollywood’s astir distinctive tropes — reincarnation — with his communicative for Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, the highest-grossing Hindi movie of 1958. The movie itself has had respective re-incarnations successful Bollywood, astir prominently Subhash Ghai’s Karz (1980), and successful part, Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007).

Ghai is often listed arsenic 1 of Ghatak’s students astatine FTII, which is my 2nd statement for Ghatak’s palpable beingness successful Bollywood today. His database of nonstop students is said to see Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, and Ghai. But the 2 large directors who notation him often are Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Did they survey straight nether him? Perhaps Chopra, who has said successful his interviews that Ghatak named him ‘Bidhu’.

Sound psychology

But their enactment carries imprints of Ghatak. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak utilized the dependable of a whip unforgettably to underline his heroine Neeta’s suffering. When she walks down the stairs from her boyfriend’s flat connected sensing the beingness of different woman, determination is the dependable of a whip. Incongruent, it would seem. Why bash we perceive a whip erstwhile we should perceive the dependable of steps oregon adjacent different people’s voices?

Later, erstwhile Neeta breaks down aft singing a song, practising for her sister’s nuptials with her erstwhile boyfriend, we perceive that whip again, lashing her again and again. This time, the connection becomes clear: it is codification to her interior being.

In Devdas (2002), Bhansali uses the aforesaid dependable erstwhile Devdas (Shah Rukh Khan) is leaving his ancestral palace arsenic a young antheral (incidentally, arsenic helium is storming down the stairs) to protestation his father’s orders. Choosing betwixt his imperious father, whose support helium craves each his life, and his archetypal love, is for Devdas akin to being lashed.

This is nonstop Ghatak, who elevated the usage of dependable successful movie to intelligence strategy. But determination is besides indirect Ghatak successful Bhansali’s work: his main characters often dice oregon termination themselves, thing we spot successful Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. Moreover, determination is an affectional streak moving to madness that we spot often successful Bhansali’s characters — whether Devdas who drinks himself to decease due to the fact that his begetter humiliates his emotion Paro (Aishwarya Rai), oregon Sameer (Salman Khan) who keeps talking to his long-dead begetter in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), oregon Peshwa Bajirao I (Ranveer Singh), successful Bajirao Mastani (2015), who dies hallucinating successful a fever, warring an imaginary conflict aft helium learns that his parent and elder lad Nana Saheb person imprisoned his woman Mastani. There is successful each of them an excessive stubbornness, similar Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara, who continues to carnivore her family’s ceaseless demands without letting on.

There is besides successful Bhansali’s work, a charmed spot for puerility and its memories — Annie (Manisha Koirala) remembers her grandma (the large Helen) and their soft with overmuch affection; Devdas and Paro are puerility playmates whose memories haunt Devdas; we cognize the thrill of touching h2o for the archetypal clip has ne'er near Michelle Mcnally (Ayesha Kapur and Rani Mukerji) erstwhile we spot her delight astatine a snowflake touching her successful Black (2005).

In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the ageing schoolteacher begetter takes his big girl Neeta retired for an aboriginal greeting outing connected her birthday, and her older member Shankar joins in. The aged antheral takes them to a agrarian idyllic scenery extracurricular the city, and the representation of happier freer times descends upon them all.

Romance of childhood

Chopra has a penchant for puerility friends turning lovers. In his acclaimed, and to my mind, finest, film Parinda, Karan (Anil Kapoor) and Paro (Madhuri Dixit) are puerility mates, who go lovers. We spot this besides in Mission Kashmir — erstwhile Altaf (Hrithik Roshan) meets Sufiya (Preity Zinta) astatine an event, helium references a speech they had near incomplete arsenic children.

In Ghatak’s Subarnarekha, Sita and Abhiram are foster siblings and puerility playmates, who autumn successful a emotion large capable for her to defy her guardian-like elder brother. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, we don’t cognize precisely erstwhile Neeta met her fellow Sanat, but helium is her schoolteacher father’s pupil suggesting that the brace knew each different from adolescence. In Bari Theke Paliye, Ghatak pitches the full movie connected the constituent of presumption of the eight-year-old Kanchan.

The kid is important to Ray arsenic good — truthful overmuch of Pather Panchali is from the lad Apu’s constituent of view. But Ray, arguably, would not spot a puerility relationship done the lens of a expansive romance. There is thing fundamentally melodramatic astir that, successful that it privileges the affectional implicit each else.

Other movie fans volition constituent to much Ghatak references, remembrances, homages, and holograms. His enactment and admirers proceed to grow. I’ll extremity with a delicious anecdote that the National Award-winning movie professional Alaka Sahani wrote successful an nonfiction titled “A River Named Ritwik” (in The Indian Express). A fewer days earlier his death, helium consoled his girl Samhita that his films would beryllium appreciated aft his death. Like the melodramatic stories helium loved to archer wherever justness is hard to find successful this life, Ghatak portended his ain glorious shade story.

The writer is the writer of The Day I Became a Runner, and a National Award-winning movie critic.