A child wanders through Kolkata, overwhelmed by the city’s noise, movement, and alien rhythms. Somewhere amid the chaos, a Baul singer looks up at the Howrah Bridge and asks a devastatingly simple question: “If so many nuts, bolts, and pieces can stay together, why couldn’t we?”
For Dr Sanghita Sen, curator of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) landmark retrospective ‘Revolutionary Cinema: The Passion of Ritwik Ghatak’, that line captures the essence of one of Indian cinema’s most visionary and politically urgent filmmakers.
“Just imagine,” she says, reflecting on ‘Bari Theke Paliye’(The Runaway), released in 1959, “Ghatak's film was released at the same time François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows came out. Both films explore a boy wandering through the city and discovering its underbelly. But while the world celebrated the arrival of the French New Wave, hardly anyone watched Ghatak’s film.”
Now, on the centenary of Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s birth, this historic BFI season is an attempt at amending that crucial neglect through what Dr Sen describes as “the first retrospective of Ghatak’s complete oeuvre anywhere in the world.”
Recovering an underexplored cinematic legacy
The season, running through the end of the month, goes far beyond his celebrated feature films. Alongside restored classics such as ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ and ‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’, audiences can experience documentaries, unfinished works, student films, scripts, and films based on Ghatak’s screenplays, many of which have rarely, if ever, been publicly screened.
For Dr Sen, the retrospective is deeply personal. “This curation is really the culmination of the last fifteen years of my research,” she explains. “One of the biggest challenges with Ghatak’s work is that his films are not easily accessible owing to the condition they were in and the rights issues surrounding them are incredibly complex and often unresolved. Thanks to Criterion restoration of Meghe Dhaka Tara and Titas Ekti Nadir Naam earlier and NFDC-NFAI taking a major initiative in 4K restoration of all of Ghatak's works that this season is made possible. ”
Even subtitles became part of the struggle. “Apart from ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ and ‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’, most of Ghatak’s films either had no subtitles or poorly subtitled,” she says. “I personally subtitled most of Ghatak’s features for this programme because I simply could not allow audiences to rediscover his films in restored form through inadequate subtitles.”
That painstaking labour reflects the same spirit of commitment Dr Sen sees in Ghatak himself, a filmmaker who believed cinema was not merely art, but a form of political intervention.
Cinema as resistance
“Oh yes, absolutely,” she says when asked whether Ghatak saw cinema as a weapon. “Ritwik Ghatak deeply believed in committed art. He repeatedly said that everything was ultimately for human beings.
Born in pre-Partition Bengal, Ghatak carried the trauma of displacement throughout his life. Unlike many political filmmakers, however, he rarely framed Partition in the language of nation-states. “He used the word Desh, homeland, and referred to Partition as Deshbhag, the division of land and of the people,” Dr Sen notes. “That choice of language reveals how personally and emotionally he viewed displacement and the existential crisis it brought with it.”
For her, Ghatak’s work feels uncannily contemporary. “The rise of right-wing politics is not confined to India; it is visible everywhere,” she says. “The world we live in feels disturbingly similar to the atmosphere of the 1930s — the rise of fascism, Nazism, and eventually the Holocaust.”
Ghatak understood that cinema had the power to confront audiences with uncomfortable truths. “He once said that he wanted to constantly ‘jostle’ and alienate viewers,” Dr Sen explains. “Not to distance them emotionally, but to force them to think critically about what they were seeing and that they need to take action to change what is happening.”
Bombay, disillusionment, and committed cinema
Unlike many filmmakers who sought commercial success, Ghatak remained deeply suspicious of entertainment detached from social reality. Ironically, he could easily have become one of the most successful screenwriters in Bombay cinema.
“He was friends with Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar,” Dr Sen says. “Bimal Roy was his mentor.” During the mid-1950s, Ghatak worked at Bombay’s Filmistan Studio and moved within the highest circles of the Hindi film industry.
But he soon became disillusioned.
“He was never comfortable within the commercial filmmaking structure of Bombay,” she says. “Eventually he returned to Kolkata because he was dissatisfied with films that were largely entertainment-driven.”
Instead, Ghatak threw himself into what Dr Sen calls the era of “committed cinema”, shaped by his involvement with the Communist cultural movements of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).
His first film, Nagarik, now considered historic, was never released at the time because of some technical difficulties. “It was probably the first crowd-funded film in Indian cinema history,” Dr Sen says. “Members of IPTA contributed money, people worked for free and one of Ghatak's IPTA comrades, Bhupati Nandi, even mortgaged his house to finance it.”
Yet recognition rarely came during Ghatak’s lifetime. Of the eight feature films he completed, three never saw proper release while he was alive. Only ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ achieved major box-office success.
Beyond the “Partition filmmaker” label
Part of what makes the BFI season extraordinary is its attempt to reveal the full breadth of Ghatak’s creative range, not simply the familiar image of him as a “Partition filmmaker.”
“People still try to pigeonhole Ghatak simply as a Partition filmmaker,” Dr Sen says. “Of course Partition was central to his work, he was a refugee filmmaker, after all. But his work is also about migration, identity, memory, trauma, and the absurdity of borders.”
The retrospective itself mirrors that sense of recovery and reconstruction. One unfinished film, ‘Ronger Golam’, survives without sound and will be screened with a sitar accompaniment specially commissioned for the event. Another rediscovered documentary, ‘Ustad Alauddin Khan’, directed by Ghatak but originally released without crediting him, also forms part of the programme.
Dr Sen hopes the renewed global attention will eventually lead to wider restoration and preservation efforts. “Hopefully, this will eventually lead to wider re-releases of his films, and perhaps even a complete box set bringing all his works together,” she says. “That is certainly the next dream I want to pursue.”
For now, though, the BFI retrospective offers audiences a rare opportunity: not simply to revisit a neglected master, but to encounter a filmmaker whose work feels startlingly urgent in a fractured world still grappling with borders, displacement, nationalism, trauma, and memory.
